10. The attraction of guilt produces fear of love, for love would never look on guilt at all. 2It is the nature of love to look upon only the truth, for there it sees itself, with which it would unite in holy union and completion. 3As love must look past fear, so must fear see love not. 4For love contains the end of guilt, as surely as fear depends on it. 5Love is attracted only to love. 6Overlooking guilt completely, it sees no fear. 7Being wholly without attack, it could not be afraid. 8Fear is attracted to what love sees not, and each believes that what the other looks upon does not exist. 9Fear looks on guilt with just the same devotion that love looks on itself. 10And each has messengers which it sends forth, and which return to it with messages written in the language in which their going forth was asked.
11. Love’s messengers are gently sent, and return with messages of love and gentleness. 2The messengers of fear are harshly ordered to seek out guilt, and cherish every scrap of evil and of sin that they can find, losing none of them on pain of death, and laying them respectfully before their lord and master. 3Perception cannot obey two masters, each asking for messages of different things in different languages. 4What fear would feed upon, love overlooks. 5What fear demands, love cannot even see. 6The fierce attraction that guilt holds for fear is wholly absent from love’s gentle perception. 7What love would look upon is meaningless to fear, and quite invisible.
12. Relationships in this world are the result of how the world is seen. 2And this depends on which emotion was called on to send its messengers to look upon it, and return with word of what they saw. 3Fear’s messengers are trained through terror, and they tremble when their master calls on them to serve him. 4For fear is merciless even to its friends. 5Its messengers steal guiltily away in hungry search of guilt, for they are kept cold and starving and made very vicious by their master, who allows them to feast only upon what they return to him. 6No little shred of guilt escapes their hungry eyes. 7And in their savage search for sin they pounce on any living thing they see, and carry it screaming to their master, to be devoured.
13. Send not these savage messengers into the world, to feast upon it and to prey upon reality. 2For they will bring you word of bones and skin and flesh. 3They have been taught to seek for the corruptible, and to return with gorges filled with things decayed and rotted. 4To them such things are beautiful, because they seem to allay their savage pangs of hunger. 5For they are frantic with the pain of fear, and would avert the punishment of him who sends them forth by offering him what they hold dear.
14. The Holy Spirit has given you love’s messengers to send instead of those you trained through fear. 2They are as eager to return to you what they hold dear as are the others. 3If you send them forth, they will see only the blameless and the beautiful, the gentle and the kind. 4They will be as careful to let no little act of charity, no tiny expression of forgiveness, no little breath of love escape their notice. 5And they will return with all the happy things they found, to share them lovingly with you. 6Be not afraid of them. 7They offer you salvation. 8Theirs are the messages of safety, for they see the world as kind.
15. If you send forth only the messengers the Holy Spirit gives you, wanting no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. 2The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt and softly brushed with beauty. 3The world contains no fear that you laid not upon it. 4And none you cannot ask love’s messengers to remove from it, and see it still. 5The Holy Spirit has given you His messengers to send to your brother and return to you with what love sees. 6They have been given to replace the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. 7And they go forth to signify the end of fear.
16. Love, too, would set a feast before you, on a table covered with a spotless cloth, set in a quiet garden where no sound but singing and a softly joyous whispering is ever heard. 2This is a feast that honors your holy relationship, and at which everyone is welcomed as an honored guest. 3And in a holy instant grace is said by everyone together, as they join in gentleness before the table of communion. 4And I will join you there, as long ago I promised and promise still. 5For in your new relationship am I made welcome. 6And where I am made welcome, there I am.
17. I am made welcome in the state of grace, which means you have at last forgiven me. 2For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die instead of you. 3To the ego sin means death, and so atonement is achieved through murder. 4Salvation is looked upon as a way by which the Son of God was killed instead of you. 5Yet would I offer you my body, you whom I love, knowing its littleness? 6Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart? 7Mine was of no greater value than yours; no better means for communication of salvation, but not its Source. 8No one can die for anyone, and death does not atone for sin. 9But you can live to show it is not real. 10The body does appear to be the symbol of sin while you believe that it can get you what you want. 11While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you will also believe that it can bring you pain. 12To think you could be satisfied and happy with so little is to hurt yourself, and to limit the happiness that you would have calls upon pain to fill your meager store and make your life complete. 13This is completion as the ego sees it. 14For guilt creeps in where happiness has been removed, and substitutes for it. 15Communion is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt, because it goes beyond the body.