1. The wish to be unfairly treated is a compromise attempt that would combine attack and innocence. 2Who can combine the wholly incompatible, and make a unity of what can never join? 3Walk you the gentle way, and you will fear no evil and no shadows in the night. 4But place no terror symbols on your path, or you will weave a crown of thorns from which your brother and yourself will not escape. 5You cannot crucify yourself alone. 6And if you are unfairly treated, he must suffer the unfairness that you see. 7You cannot sacrifice yourself alone. 8For sacrifice is total. 9If it could occur at all it would entail the whole of God’s creation, and the Father with the sacrifice of His beloved Son.
2. In your release from sacrifice is his made manifest, and shown to be his own. 2But every pain you suffer do you see as proof that he is guilty of attack. 3Thus would you make yourself to be the sign that he has lost his innocence, and need but look on you to realize that he has been condemned. 4And what to you has been unfair will come to him in righteousness. 5The unjust vengeance that you suffer now belongs to him, and when it rests on him are you set free. 6Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of his guilt, for you will not escape the death you made for him. 7But in his innocence you find your own.
3. Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated or in need of anything, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God’s Son. 2You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate and damning him to hell. 3Yet this is writ in hell and not in Heaven, where you are beyond attack and prove his innocence. 4The picture of yourself you offer him you show yourself, and give it all your faith. 5The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is no pain and no reproach at all. 6And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence.
4. The power of witness is beyond belief because it brings conviction in its wake. 2The witness is believed because he points beyond himself to what he represents. 3A sick and suffering you but represents your brother’s guilt; the witness that you send lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape. 4This sick and sorry picture you accept, if only it can serve to punish him. 5The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. 6Death seems an easy price, if they can say, “Behold me, brother, at your hand I die.” 7For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors must be sins. 8Sickness is but a “little” death; a form of vengeance not yet total. 9Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. 10The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother you have looked upon in grief. 11And everything that it has shown to him have you believed, because it witnessed to the guilt in him which you perceived and loved.
5. Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a different you. 2It is a picture of a body still, for what you really are cannot be seen nor pictured. 3Yet this one has not been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. 4It witnesses to the eternal truth that you cannot be hurt, and points beyond itself to both your innocence and his. 5Show this unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. 6And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look beyond it to the innocence that he beholds in you. 7Here is the proof that he has never sinned; that nothing which his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind. 8That no reproach he laid upon his heart was ever justified, and no attack can ever touch him with the poisoned and relentless sting of fear.
6. Attest his innocence and not his guilt. 2Your healing is his comfort and his health because it proves illusions are not true. 3It is not will for life but wish for death that is the motivation for this world. 4Its only purpose is to prove guilt real. 5No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. 6These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the system they speak for and represent. 7And each has many voices, speaking to your brother and yourself in different tongues. 8And yet to both the message is the same. 9Adornment of the body seeks to show how lovely are the witnesses for guilt. 10Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life; how easily destroyed is what you love. 11Depression speaks of death, and vanity of real concern with anything at all.
7. The strongest witness to futility, that bolsters all the rest and helps them paint the picture in which sin is justified, is sickness in whatever form it takes. 2The sick have reason for each one of their unnatural desires and strange needs. 3For who could live a life so soon cut short and not esteem the worth of passing joys? 4What pleasures could there be that will endure? 5Are not the frail entitled to believe that every stolen scrap of pleasure is their righteous payment for their little lives? 6Their death will pay the price for all of them, if they enjoy their benefits or not. 7The end of life must come, whatever way that life be spent. 8And so take pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral.
8. These are not sins, but witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and death are real, and innocence and sin will end alike within the termination of the grave. 2If this were true, there would be reason to remain content to seek for passing joys and cherish little pleasures where you can. 3Yet in this picture is the body not perceived as neutral and without a goal inherent in itself. 4For it becomes the symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences still are there to see, so that the cause can never be denied.
9. Your function is to show your brother sin can have no cause. 2How futile must it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what your function is can never be! 3The Holy Spirit’s picture changes not the body into something it is not. 4It only takes away from it all signs of accusation and of blamefulness. 5Pictured without a purpose, it is seen as neither sick nor well, nor bad nor good. 6No grounds are offered that it may be judged in any way at all. 7It has no life, but neither is it dead. 8It stands apart from all experience of love or fear. 9For now it witnesses to nothing yet, its purpose being open, and the mind made free again to choose what it is for. 10Now is it not condemned, but waiting for a purpose to be given, that it may fulfill the function that it will receive.
10. Into this empty space, from which the goal of sin has been removed, is Heaven free to be remembered. 2Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. 3The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. 4Let it have healing as its purpose. 5Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. 6Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. 7And to your brother let its message be, “Behold me, brother, at your hand I live.”
11. The simple way to let this be achieved is merely this; to let the body have no purpose from the past, when you were sure you knew its purpose was to foster guilt. 2For this insists your crippled picture is a lasting sign of what it represents. 3This leaves no space in which a different view, another purpose, can be given it. 4You do not know its purpose. 5You but gave illusions of a purpose to a thing you made to hide your function from yourself. 6This thing without a purpose cannot hide the function that the Holy Spirit gave. 7Let, then, its purpose and your function both be reconciled at last and seen as one.