75:5.6

Although seeing the destruction of seven children, the noble mother, after one embrace, stripped off her feelings through faith in God. For just as in a council room, seeing in her own soul vehement counselors, nature and parentage and love of her children, and the racking of her children, she holding two votes, one for the death, the other for the preservation of her children, didn’t lean to that which would have saved her children for the safety of a brief space. But this daughter of Abraham remembered his holy fortitude.

Then I left the reflections I was engaged in, and answered her in anger, “You most foolish woman, don’t you see our mourning, and what has happened to us? For Zion the mother of us all is full of sorrow, and much humbled. It is right now to mourn deeply, since we all mourn, and to be sorrowful, since we are all in sorrow, but you are mourning for one son. Ask the earth, and she will tell you that it is she which ought to mourn for so many that grow upon her. For out of her, all had their beginnings, and others will come; and, behold, almost all of them walk into destruction, and the multitude of them is utterly doomed. Who then should mourn more, she who has lost so great a multitude, or you, who are grieved but for one? But if you say to me, ‘My lamentation is not like the earth’s, for I have lost the fruit of my womb, which I brought forth with pains, and bare with sorrows;’ but it is with the earth after the manner of the earth. The multitude present in it has gone as it came. Then say I to you, ‘Just as you have brought forth with sorrow, even so the earth also has given her fruit, namely, people, ever since the beginning to him who made her.’ Now therefore keep your sorrow to yourself, and bear with a good courage the adversities which have happened to you. For if you will acknowledge the decree of God to be just, you will both receive your son in time, and will be praised among women. Go your way then into the city to your husband.”

I answered then, “This is my first and last saying, that it would have been better if the earth had not produced Adam, or else, when it had produced him, to have restrained him from sinning. For what profit is it for all who are in this present time to live in heaviness, and after death to look for punishment? O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the evil hasn’t fallen on you alone, but on all of us who come from you. For what profit is it to us, if an immortal time is promised to us, but we have done deeds that bring death? And that there is promised us an everlasting hope, but we have most miserably failed? And that there are reserved habitations of health and safety, but we have lived wickedly? And that the glory of the Most High will defend those who have led a pure life, but we have walked in the most wicked ways of all? And that a paradise will be revealed, whose fruit endures without decay, in which is abundance and healing, but we won’t enter into it, for we have lived in perverse ways? And that the faces of those who have practiced self-control will shine more than the stars, but our faces will be blacker than darkness? For while we lived and committed iniquity, we didn’t consider what we would have to suffer after death.”