Bahá'í eschatology is individual and progressive. The soul comes into being at conception, is not pre-existent, and does not reincarnate — reincarnation is explicitly rejected, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá addresses it directly in Some Answered Questions. After death the soul continues to develop through worlds that cannot be described in terms available to the living, and the standard analogy is the foetus in the womb developing organs it has no use for until birth. Heaven and hell are conditions rather than locations: nearness to God and remoteness from God, with no eternal punishment and no permanent barrier to progress. Prayer by the living for the dead is held to assist them, and the dead are held to be able to assist the living. There is no last judgment in the sense of a single event terminating history; the resurrection language of earlier scriptures is read symbolically, as the appearance of a new Manifestation reviving a spiritually dead age.