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assert the freedom which God has given them,—the freedom of being silent where He has not spoken, being well assured that if they do not, they will soon be compelled to keep silence when He has spoken, nay, to deny that He wishes that all men should be saved, though He has declared that He does.

In the present Edition of these Essays, I have altered some passages which were said to be obscure, and have erased some which have caused unnecessary offence. In the Essay on the Atonement, besides some changes in my own language, I have made one omission with very great reluctance. I had quoted the beautiful Collect for the Sunday before Easter. I quoted it simply to show, by the most living instance, that the Church referred the Sacrifice of Christ to the "tender love of God to mankind." I never even alluded to the clause which speaks of our "following the example of his great humility," not because I did not prize it, or believe that it stood in the closest connexion with the rest of the prayer, but because it did not concern the special truth of which I was speaking. Yet I read with my own eyes, in one of our religious newspapers, the charge that I had appealed to this Collect because I regarded Christ's death not as a sacrifice, but simply as an example and because I wished to fix that opinion upon the Church! As the Church believes, and as I believe, in Christ's Sacrifice, not in a narrower or more "attenuated sense than that in which this religious newspaper believes it, but in an infinitely wider and deeper sense,—as I believe it to be a real sacrifice made by the Son, of His whole spirit, soul and body, to the Father,