." Nor is it. Nor could I with
any cogency have brought this as an argument against the Church of
England, for the Church of England has retained Confession, nay,
Sacramental Confession. No fair man can read the form of Absolution
in the Anglican Prayer in the Visitation of the Sick, without seeing
that that Church _does_ sanction and provide for Confession and
Absolution. If that form does not contain the profession of a grave
sacramental act, words have no meaning. The form is almost in the
words of the Roman form; and, by the time that this clergyman has
succeeded in explaining it away, he will have also got skill enough
to explain away the Roman form; and if he did but handle my words
with that latitude with which he interprets his own formularies, he
would prove that, instead of my being superstitious and frantic, I
was the most Protestant of preachers and the most latitudinarian of
thinkers. It would be charity in him, in his reading of my words, to
use some of that power of evasion, of which he shows himself such a
master in his dealing with his own Prayer Book. Yet he has the
assurance at p. 14 to ask, "Why was the Sermon preached? to insinuate
that a Church which had sacramental confession and a celibate clergy
was the only true Church?"

"Why?" I will tell the reader, _why_; and with this view will speak,
first of the contents of the Sermon, then of its subject, then of its
circumstances.

1. It was one of the last six sermons which I wrote when I was an
Anglican. It was one of the five sermons I preached in St. Mary's
between Christmas and Easter, 1843, the year when I gave up my
living. The MS. of the sermon is destroyed; but I believe, and my
memory too bears me out, as far as it goes, that the sentence in
question about celibacy and confession _was not preached at all_. The
volume, in which this sermon is found, was published _after_ that I
had given up St. Mary's, when I had no call on me to restrain the
expression of anything which I might hold: and I state an important
fact about it in the advertisement, which this truth-loving writer
_suppresses_. Blot _nine_.

My words, which stared him in the face, are as follows:--"In
preparing [these Sermons] for publication, _a few words and
sentences_ have in several places been _added_, which will be found
to express more _of private or personal opinion_, than it was
expedient to introduce into the _instruction_ delivered in Church to
a parochial Congrega