1. How simple is salvation! 2All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. 3The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. 4And that is all. 5Can this be hard to learn by anyone who wants it to be true? 6Only unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy lesson difficult. 7How hard is it to see that what is false can not be true, and what is true can not be false? 8You can no longer say that you perceive no differences in false and true. 9You have been told exactly how to tell one from the other, and just what to do if you become confused. 10Why, then, do you persist in learning not such simple things?
2. There is a reason. 2But confuse it not with difficulty in the simple things salvation asks you learn. 3It teaches but the very obvious. 4It merely goes from one apparent lesson to the next, in easy steps that lead you gently from one to another, with no strain at all. 5This cannot be confusing, yet you are confused. 6For somehow you believe that what is totally confused is easier to learn and understand. 7What you have taught yourself is such a giant learning feat it is indeed incredible. 8But you accomplished it because you wanted to, and did not pause in diligence to judge it hard to learn or too complex to grasp.
3. No one who understands what you have learned, how carefully you learned it, and the pains to which you went to practice and repeat the lessons endlessly, in every form you could conceive of them, could ever doubt the power of your learning skill. 2There is no greater power in the world. 3The world was made by it, and even now depends on nothing else. 4The lessons you have taught yourself have been so overlearned and fixed they rise like heavy curtains to obscure the simple and the obvious. 5Say not you cannot learn them. 6For your power to learn is strong enough to teach you that your will is not your own, your thoughts do not belong to you, and even you are someone else.
4. Who could maintain that lessons such as these are easy? 2Yet you have learned more than this. 3You have continued, taking every step, however difficult, without complaint, until a world was built that suited you. 4And every lesson that makes up the world arises from the first accomplishment of learning; an enormity so great the Holy Spirit’s Voice seems small and still before its magnitude. 5The world began with one strange lesson, powerful enough to render God forgotten, and His Son an alien to himself, in exile from the home where God Himself established him. 6You who have taught yourself the Son of God is guilty, say not that you cannot learn the simple things salvation teaches you!
5. Learning is an ability you made and gave yourself. 2It was not made to do the Will of God, but to uphold a wish that it could be opposed, and that a will apart from it was yet more real than it. 3And this has learning sought to demonstrate, and you have learned what it was made to teach. 4Now does your ancient overlearning stand implacable before the Voice of truth, and teach you that Its lessons are not true; too hard to learn, too difficult to see, and too opposed to what is really true. 5Yet you will learn them, for their learning is the only purpose for your learning skill the Holy Spirit sees in all the world. 6His simple lessons in forgiveness have a power mightier than yours, because they call from God and from your Self to you.
6. Is this a little Voice, so small and still It cannot rise above the senseless noise of sounds that have no meaning? 2God willed not His Son forget Him. 3And the power of His Will is in the Voice that speaks for Him. 4Which lesson will you learn? 5What outcome is inevitable, sure as God, and far beyond all doubt and question? 6Can it be your little learning, strange in outcome and incredible in difficulty will withstand the simple lessons being taught to you in every moment of each day, since time began and learning had been made?
7. The lessons to be learned are only two. 2Each has its outcome in a different world. 3And each world follows surely from its source. 4The certain outcome of the lesson that God’s Son is guilty is the world you see. 5It is a world of terror and despair. 6Nor is there hope of happiness in it. 7There is no plan for safety you can make that ever will succeed. 8There is no joy that you can seek for here and hope to find. 9Yet this is not the only outcome which your learning can produce. 10However much you may have overlearned your chosen task, the lesson that reflects the Love of God is stronger still. 11And you will learn God’s Son is innocent, and see another world.
8. The outcome of the lesson that God’s Son is guiltless is a world in which there is no fear, and everything is lit with hope and sparkles with a gentle friendliness. 2Nothing but calls to you in soft appeal to be your friend, and let it join with you. 3And never does a call remain unheard, misunderstood, nor left unanswered in the selfsame tongue in which the call was made. 4And you will understand it was this call that everyone and everything within the world has always made, but you had not perceived it as it was. 5And now you see you were mistaken. 6You had been deceived by forms the call was hidden in. 7And so you did not hear it, and had lost a friend who always wanted to be part of you. 8The soft eternal calling of each part of God’s creation to the whole is heard throughout the world this second lesson brings.
9. There is no living thing that does not share the universal Will that it be whole, and that you do not leave its call unheard. 2Without your answer is it left to die, as it is saved from death when you have heard its calling as the ancient call to life, and understood that it is but your own. 3The Christ in you remembers God with all the certainty with which He knows His Love. 4But only if His Son is innocent can He be Love. 5For God were fear indeed if he whom He created innocent could be a slave to guilt. 6God’s perfect Son remembers his creation. 7But in guilt he has forgotten what he really is.
10. The fear of God results as surely from the lesson that His Son is guilty as God’s Love must be remembered when he learns his innocence. 2For hate must father fear, and look upon its father as itself. 3How wrong are you who fail to hear the call that echoes past each seeming call to death, that sings behind each murderous attack and pleads that love restore the dying world. 4You do not understand Who calls to you beyond each form of hate; each call to war. 5Yet you will recognize Him as you give Him answer in the language that He calls. 6He will appear when you have answered Him, and you will know in Him that God is Love.
11. What is temptation but a wish to make the wrong decision on what you would learn, and have an outcome that you do not want? 2It is the recognition that it is a state of mind unwanted that becomes the means whereby the choice is reassessed; another outcome seen to be preferred. 3You are deceived if you believe you want disaster and disunity and pain. 4Hear not the call for this within yourself. 5But listen, rather, to the deeper call beyond it that appeals for peace and joy. 6And all the world will give you joy and peace. 7For as you hear, you answer. 8And behold! 9Your answer is the proof of what you learned. 10Its outcome is the world you look upon.
12. Let us be still an instant, and forget all things we ever learned, all thoughts we had, and every preconception that we hold of what things mean and what their purpose is. 2Let us remember not our own ideas of what the world is for. 3We do not know. 4Let every image held of everyone be loosened from our minds and swept away.
13. Be innocent of judgment, unaware of any thoughts of evil or of good that ever crossed your mind of anyone. 2Now do you know him not. 3But you are free to learn of him, and learn of him anew. 4Now is he born again to you, and you are born again to him, without the past that sentenced him to die, and you with him. 5Now is he free to live as you are free, because an ancient learning passed away, and left a place for truth to be reborn.