That is, that his faculties of knowledge and science should be found in their perfection. The deed by which soul acquires perfection in those two faculties are goodness and virtue, and those that retard it are evil and wicked. And as these actions are most of them fixed by divine revelation, religions appeared to fix them. With that there also appears a knowledge of those qualities, exhorting the people towards them. They ordered men to act upon goodness, and shew evil. They taught them the quantity of the deeds which will be good for all the people, both in practice and in knowledge taken together. They also taught them the theoretical knowledge of things, which all the people should know, such as the knowledge of God, angels, of higher creation, and of goodness. In this way they also taught them the quantity of the acts which would be necessary to make the souls excel in virtue. This is especially the case with our religion, Islam, for when compared with other religions, it is found that it is absolutely _the_ best religion. Hence it was the last of divine dispensations. Now divine revelation has informed us in all the religions that the soul will live, and all the argument of the learned people have established the same. The souls are freed from physical desires after death. If they be pure, their purity is doubled by this freedom from desires. If they be evil this separation increases their depravity, for they are troubled by the evil which they have already earned, and their regret increases about the opportunities which they lost before their separation from the body, for this purification is not possible without it. It is to this that following verse refers:--A soul would say, “Alas, for that I have been negligent in my duties towards God: Verily I have been one of the scorners.”[161] All the religions agree about this condition of man, and call it his last goodness or misery. This being so, there could not be found in the visible world anything which may be given as an illustration, so there is a difference in its description in the revelations given to different prophets. We mean to say, that there is a difference in illustrating the condition of the good and bad soul on that occasion. There are some which have not given any illustrations of that happiness or misery which the good and bad souls will have there. They have only said that the conditions there would be only spiritual, and pleasures angelic. Others have given instances from the visible world; that is, they have given the examples of the pleasures here for the pleasures of the next world, after deducting the trouble borne in acquiring them, and in the same way, they have illustrated the misery there, by the example of misery here, after deducting the pleasure which we derive from it. Either the people of these religions received from God revelations which those did not receive who made the next world purely spiritual, or they saw, that