Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 26: Divine Justice

5. Returning What Is Due

The State of Innocence is merely this: fear and the entire desire to attack are gone, and so there is no reason to perceive the Children of the Divine as other than they are. The need for guilt is gone because it has no purpose, and is meaningless without the goal of separation.

Separation and fear and attack are bound as one illusion, each the cause and aim and justifier of the others. Each is meaningless alone, but each one seems to draw a meaning from the others. Each depends upon the others for whatever sense it seems to have. And no one could believe in one unless they also believed in the others, for each attests that the others must be true.

Separation and fear and attack make Divine Essence your adversary in your mind, and the Divine along with It. And with adversaries like these you must be afraid, and also fearful of yourself. For you have hurt yourself, and made your holy Self your adversary. From this it follows that you must believe that you are not yourself, but something alien to yourself, a “something else” to be feared instead of loved.

Who would attack something they perceive as wholly innocent? And who, because they wish to attack, can fail to think something must be guilty to deserve the wish, and at the same time leave the attacker guiltless? And who could see the Children of the Divine as innocent, and still wish to attack them?

Divine Essence stands before you and your sisters and brothers each time you perceive one another. It has not departed because your spiritual eye is closed. But what is there to perceive by searching for your awakener through sightless eyes? It is not Divine Essence you perceive by looking thus. It is an adversary in your mind – the ego – projected outward that you have confused with Divine Essence that you look upon. And in the madness that this “enemy” has induced in you, you have hated what you looked upon in your sisters and brothers because there is only Innocence in them for you to see. Nor while you perceive with the body’s tiny senses will you hear your sisters and brothers’ tearful call, unchanged in content in whatever form the call is made, that you unite with them, and join with them in Innocence and Peace. And yet, beneath the ego’s senseless shrieks, such is the Call that the Divine has given them, that you might hear in them Its Call to you, and answer by returning unto the Divine what is Its Own.

The Children of the Divine ask only this of you: that you return to them what is their Due, so that you may share in It with them. Alone does no one have this Gift from the Creator, so must It remain useless to both. Shared, It will give to each an equal Strength to awaken the other, and awaken yourself along with them. Forgiven by you, your sisters and brothers offer you awakening. Condemned by you, they appear to offer rejection and death to you. You perceive in everyone only the reflection of what you chose to have them be to you. If you decide against their proper function of awakening in this world – the only one they have here in Truth – then you are depriving them of all the Joy they would have found had they fulfilled the Role the Divine gave to them for you.

But think not Heaven is lost to them alone. Nor can It be regained unless the Way is shown to them through you, that you may find It walking by their side. It is no sacrifice that they be awakened, for by their Freedom will you gain your own. To let their function here be fulfilled is simply the means to let yours be as well.

And so you walk toward the Reality of Heaven or the illusion of hell, but never alone. How beautiful the Innocence of your sisters and brothers will be when you behold It! And how great will be your Joy when they are free to offer you the Gift of Vision the Divine gave to them for you. They have no need but this: that you allow them the Freedom to complete the Task the Divine gave to them. Remember only this: that what they do, you do, along with them. And as you perceive them, so do you define the function they will have for you, until you perceive them clearly, and let them be what the Divine appointed that they be to you.

Within the disdain that the separated ones in insanity may cherish toward themselves and each other is the Divine believed to be without the Power to save from the pain of hell what It created. But in the Love they show themselves and each other is the Divine made free to let Its Will be done. In each of you, you perceive the picture of your own belief of what the Will of the Divine must be for you. In your forgiveness will you understand Its Love for you. Through your attack, thinking Heaven must be hell, you will believe that your Creator disdains you.

Perceive your sisters and brothers once again, with the understanding that they are the Way to Heaven or the path to hell as you perceive them. And remember this: the role you give to them is given you, and you will walk the way you pointed out to them, because it is the judgment or assessment you made upon yourself.