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.