1. If the patient must change his mind in order to be healed, what does the teacher of God do? 2Can he change the patient’s mind for him? 3Certainly not. 4For those already willing to change their minds he has no function except to rejoice with them, for they have become teachers of God with him. 5He has, however, a more specific function for those who do not understand what healing is. 6These patients do not realize they have chosen sickness. 7On the contrary, they believe that sickness has chosen them. 8Nor are they open-minded on this point. 9The body tells them what to do and they obey. 10They have no idea how insane this concept is. 11If they even suspected it, they would be healed. 12Yet they suspect nothing. 13To them the separation is quite real.
2. To them God’s teachers come, to represent another choice which they had forgotten. 2The simple presence of a teacher of God is a reminder. 3His thoughts ask for the right to question what the patient has accepted as true. 4As God’s messengers, His teachers are the symbols of salvation. 5They ask the patient for forgiveness for God’s Son in his own Name. 6They stand for the Alternative. 7With God’s Word in their minds they come in benediction, not to heal the sick but to remind them of the remedy God has already given them. 8It is not their hands that heal. 9It is not their voice that speaks the Word of God. 10They merely give what has been given them. 11Very gently they call to their brothers to turn away from death: “Behold, you Son of God, what life can offer you. 12Would you choose sickness in place of this?”
3. Not once do the advanced teachers of God consider the forms of sickness in which their brother believes. 2To do this is to forget that all of them have the same purpose, and therefore are not really different. 3They seek for God’s Voice in this brother who would so deceive himself as to believe God’s Son can suffer. 4And they remind him that he did not make himself, and must remain as God created him. 5They recognize illusions can have no effect. 6The truth in their minds reaches out to the truth in the minds of their brothers, so that illusions are not reinforced. 7They are thus brought to truth; truth is not brought to them. 8So are they dispelled, not by the will of another, but by the union of the one Will with itself. 9And this is the function of God’s teachers; to see no will as separate from their own, nor theirs as separate from God’s.