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—as I believe it is a sacrifice which takes away sin, a sacrifice, satisfaction, and oblation for the sins of the whole world,—I have deliberately blotted out a sentence which was worth all the rest of the Essay together, rather than even seem to sanction so monstrous an inference. But I have not, of course, modified in the slightest degree the principles which I maintained in that Essay.

The Church does not maintain in one prayer, but in all its prayers, that the love of God is the only root and ground of Christ's Atonement, and that the perfect sub- mission of the Son to the will of the Father constitutes the deepest meaning of the Sacrifice. These principles belong to the essence of our faith. In life, in death, I hope I may never abandon them or shrink from confessing them, and from repudiating any notion which sets them at nought or weakens them. I have perceived that the fact of the Atonement, which is the fact of the Gospel, is lost to numbers of people who are very earnest and who desire to be thoroughly Christian, through the restless efforts which their understandings make to apprehend the cause of it. They do not believe the Atonement, but an explanation of the Atonement which they have received from others or devised for themselves. And so they do not actually feed upon the Sacrifice which is given for the life of the world, but on some dry notions about the Sacrifice, which cannot give life to any human being. But this is not all. These explanations, being exceedingly plausible, seeming wonderfully to conspire with the experiences of a sin-sick soul, being such as a Heathen would use to defend the