(Isaiah xliii: 25). Blotting out is the sending out of manifestation into
the darkness of non-manifestation, out of Being into Not-being; and in this
way the past error ceases to have any existence and so ceases to have any
further effect upon us. It is "blotted out," and from this new standpoint
has never been at all; so that to continue to contemplate it is to give a
false sense of existence to that which in effect has no existence. It is
that Affirmation of Negation which is the root of all evil. It is the
inversion of our God-given creative power of thought, calling into
existence that which in the Perfect Life of the Spirit never had or could
have any existence, and therefore it creates the sense of inharmony,
opposition, and separation. Of course this is only relatively to ourselves,
for we cannot create eternal principles. They are the Being of God; and as
I have already shown these great Principles of the Affirmative may be
summed up in the two words Love and Beauty--Love in essence and Beauty in
manifestation; but since we can only live from the standpoint of our own
consciousness we can make a false creation built upon the idea of opposites
to the all-creating Love and Beauty, which false creation with all its
accompaniments of limitation, sin, sorrow, sickness, and death, must
necessarily be real to us until we perceive that these things were not
created by God, the Spirit of the Affirmative, but by our own inversion of
our true relation to the All-creating Being.

When, then, we view the matter in this light the Offering once for all of
the Divine Sacrifice for the sin of the whole world is seen not to be a
mere ecclesiastical dogma having no relation of cause and effect, but to be
the highest application of the same principle of cause and effect by which
the whole creation, ourselves included, has been brought into existence--
the Self-Contemplation of Spirit producing corresponding manifestation,
only now working on the level of Individual Personality.