1. Love is extension. 2To withhold the smallest gift is not to know love’s purpose. 3Love offers everything forever. 4Hold back but one belief, one offering, and love is gone, because you asked a substitute to take its place. 5And now must war, the substitute for peace, come with the one alternative that you can choose for love. 6Your choosing it has given it all the reality it seems to have.
2. Beliefs will never openly attack each other because conflicting outcomes are impossible. 2But an unrecognized belief is a decision to war in secret, where the results of conflict are kept unknown and never brought to reason, to be considered sensible or not. 3And many senseless outcomes have been reached, and meaningless decisions have been made and kept hidden, to become beliefs now given power to direct all subsequent decisions. 4Mistake you not the power of these hidden warriors to disrupt your peace. 5For it is at their mercy while you decide to leave it there. 6The secret enemies of peace, your least decision to choose attack instead of love, unrecognized and swift to challenge you to combat and to violence far more inclusive than you think, are there by your election. 7Do not deny their presence nor their terrible results. 8All that can be denied is their reality, but not their outcome.
3. All that is ever cherished as a hidden belief, to be defended though unrecognized, is faith in specialness. 2This takes many forms, but always clashes with the reality of God’s creation and with the grandeur that He gave His Son. 3What else could justify attack? 4For who could hate someone whose Self is his, and Whom he knows? 5Only the special could have enemies, for they are different and not the same. 6And difference of any kind imposes orders of reality, and a need to judge that cannot be escaped.
4. What God created cannot be attacked, for there is nothing in the universe unlike itself. 2But what is different calls for judgment, and this must come from someone “better,” someone incapable of being like what he condemns, “above” it, sinless by comparison with it. 3And thus does specialness become a means and end at once. 4For specialness not only sets apart, but serves as grounds from which attack on those who seem “beneath” the special one is “natural” and “just.” 5The special ones feel weak and frail because of differences, for what would make them special is their enemy. 6Yet they protect its enmity and call it “friend.” 7On its behalf they fight against the universe, for nothing in the world they value more.
5. Specialness is the great dictator of the wrong decisions. 2Here is the grand illusion of what you are and what your brother is. 3And here is what must make the body dear and worth preserving. 4Specialness must be defended. 5Illusions can attack it, and they do. 6For what your brother must become to keep your specialness is an illusion. 7He who is “worse” than you must be attacked, so that your specialness can live on his defeat. 8For specialness is triumph, and its victory is his defeat and shame. 9How can he live, with all your sins upon him? 10And who must be his conqueror but you?
6. Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you were like him? 2Could you attack him if you realized you journey with him, to a goal that is the same? 3Would you not help him reach it in every way you could, if his attainment of it were perceived as yours? 4You are his enemy in specialness; his friend in a shared purpose. 5Specialness can never share, for it depends on goals that you alone can reach. 6And he must never reach them, or your goal is jeopardized. 7Can love have meaning where the goal is triumph? 8And what decision can be made for this that will not hurt you?
7. Your brother is your friend because his Father created him like you. 2There is no difference. 3You have been given to your brother that love might be extended, not cut off from him. 4What you keep is lost to you. 5God gave you and your brother Himself, and to remember this is now the only purpose that you share. 6And so it is the only one you have. 7Could you attack your brother if you chose to see no specialness of any kind between you and him? 8Look fairly at whatever makes you give your brother only partial welcome, or would let you think that you are better off apart. 9Is it not always your belief your specialness is limited by your relationship? 10And is not this the “enemy” that makes you and your brother illusions to each other?
8. The fear of God and of your brother comes from each unrecognized belief in specialness. 2For you demand your brother bow to it against his will. 3And God Himself must honor it or suffer vengeance. 4Every twinge of malice, or stab of hate or wish to separate arises here. 5For here the purpose that you and your brother share becomes obscured from both of you. 6You would oppose this course because it teaches you you and your brother are alike. 7You have no purpose that is not the same, and none your Father does not share with you. 8For your relationship has been made clean of special goals. 9And would you now defeat the goal of holiness that Heaven gave it? 10What perspective can the special have that does not change with every seeming blow, each slight, or fancied judgment on themselves?
9. Those who are special must defend illusions against the truth. 2For what is specialness but an attack upon the Will of God? 3You love your brother not while it is this you would defend against him. 4This is what he attacks, and you protect. 5Here is the ground of battle which you wage against him. 6Here must he be your enemy and not your friend. 7Never can there be peace among the different. 8He is your friend because you are the same.