To you, in whose special relationship the Holy Spirit entered, it is
given to release and be released from the dedication to death. For it
was offered you, and you ACCEPTED. Yet you must learn still more about
this strange devotion, for it contains the third of the obstacles
which peace must flow across. No-one can die unless he chooses
death. What SEEMS to be the fear of death is really its ATTRACTION.
Guilt, too, is feared and fearful. Yet it could have no hold at all
except on those who are attracted to it and seek it out. And so it is
with death. Made by the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living
things, because the ego is the “enemy” of life.

And yet a shadow cannot kill. What is a shadow to the living? They but
walk past and it is gone. But what of those whose dedication it is NOT
to live; the black-draped “sinners,” the ego’s mournful chorus, plodding
so heavily away from life, dragging their chains and marching in the
slow procession which honors their grim master, lord of death? Touch any
one of them with the gentle hands of forgiveness, and watch the chains
fall away, along with yours. See him throw aside the black robe he was
wearing to his funeral, and hear him laugh at death. The sentence sin
would lay upon him he can escape through your forgiveness.

This is no arrogance. It is the Will of God. What is impossible to you
who chose His Will as yours? What is death to you? YOUR dedication is
not to death, nor to its master. When you accepted the Holy Spirit’s
purpose in place of the ego’s, you renounced death, exchanging it for
life. We know that an idea leaves not its source. And death is the result
of the thought we call the ego, as surely as life is the result of the
Thought of God.