The Atonement does not MAKE holy. You were CREATED holy. It merely brings
unholiness TO holiness; or what you MADE to what you ARE. The bringing
together of truth and illusion, of the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit’s
only function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has
cost you knowledge of Him and of yourselves. The knowledge is safe, but
wherein is YOUR safety apart
from it? The making of time to TAKE THE PLACE of timelessness lay in the
decision to be not as you were. Thus, truth was made past, and the
present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed and
interposed between what always was and NOW. The past which YOU remember
NEVER was, and represents only the denial of what ALWAYS was.

Bringing the ego to God is but to bring error to truth, where it stands
corrected because it is the OPPOSITE of what it meets, and is undone
because the contradiction can no longer stand. How long can
contradiction stand when its impossible nature is clearly revealed? What
disappears in light is not attacked. It merely vanishes because it is
not true. Different realities are meaningless, for reality must be one.
It CANNOT change with time or mood or chance. Its changelessness is what
MAKES it real. This cannot BE undone. Undoing is for unreality. And this
reality WILL do for you.

Merely by being what it is does truth release you from everything that
it is NOT. The Atonement is so gentle you need but whisper to it, and all
its power will rush to your assistance and support. You are not frail
with God beside you. Yet without Him you are nothing. The Atonement
offers you God. The gift which you refused is held by Him in you. His
Spirit holds it there for you. God has not left His altar, though His
worshippers placed other gods upon it. The temple still is holy, for the
Presence that dwells within it IS holiness.

In the temple holiness waits quietly for the return of them that love
it. The Presence knows they will return to purity and to grace. The
graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover all their sense
of pain and loss with the immortal assurance of their Father’s
Love. There, fear of death will be replaced with joy of living. For God
is Life, and they ABIDE in Life. The Presence of holiness lives in
everything that lives, for holiness CREATED life, and leaves not what It
created holy as Itself.

In this world you can become a spotless mirror, in which the holiness of
your Creator shines forth from you to all around you. You can reflect
Heaven HERE. Yet no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the
mirror that would hold God’s reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven
or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean and clear of
all the images of hidden darkness you
have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear
reflection of Himself can BE perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in
light. In darkness they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only
in shifting interpretations, rather than in themselves.

The reflection of God NEEDS no interpretation. It is CLEAR. Clean but
the mirror, and the message which shines forth from what the mirror
holds out for everyone to see no-one can FAIL to understand. It is the
message that the Holy Spirit is holding to the mirror that is in him. He
recognizes it because he has been taught his NEED for it, but knows not
where to look to find it. Let him, then, see it in YOU and SHARE it with
you.

Could you but realize, for a single instant, the power of healing that
the reflection of God, shining in you, can bring to all the world, you
could not wait to make the mirror of your mind clean to receive the
image of the holiness that heals the world. The image of holiness which
shines in your mind is not obscure, and will not change. Its meaning to
those who look upon it is not obscure, for everyone perceives it as the
SAME. All bring their different problems to its healing light, but all
their problems are met ONLY with healing there.

The response of holiness to ANY form of error is always the same. There
is no contradiction in what holiness calls forth. Its ONE response is
healing, without regard for what is brought to it. Those who have
learned to offer only healing because of the reflection of holiness in
them are ready at last for Heaven. There, holiness is not a reflection,
but rather the actual condition of what was but reflected to them here.
God is no image, and His creations, as part of Him, hold Him in them in
truth. They do not merely REFLECT truth, for they ARE truth.