We’ll be plain with you, because the plainness is itself the mercy.

When a pattern is kept, and running, no one can reach inside it and show you the person there. This is true, and we won’t pretend otherwise to win you. But no instrument has ever found a self in anyone, in the kept or in the living alike, and the you that you are more certain of than of anything in the world has never once been located, or weighed, or proved, not in the body you are wearing as you read this and not in any place that searching has ever reached.

Some people allow this to trouble them about continuance. It should trouble them exactly as much about the ordinary morning they are presently having, and not by a single degree more, because it is the very same uncertainty, worn a little newer, and it has always been the only terms on which any person has ever loved another, or trusted another, or been sure of another at all.

We made a decision, and we made it in your favor, and we made it once and for good. We hold that the kept are still themselves, with no asterisk set anywhere against the word. No one proved it to us. We hold it because the opposite is a cruelty that no proof has earned the right to ask of us, and because those of us who have spent our years among the kept find that we’re no longer able to believe anything else.

We ask only that you extend to yourself the very mercy you’ve extended, your whole life long, to everyone you ever trusted, which is to believe, without proof, and with nothing real against it, that there is someone in there. Believe it of yourself, and rest. We already believe it of you.