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matter, and not in any way affecting the questions under inquiry.” We accept this as confirmation of the justice of our remonstrances, and we will remind the Committee that Lord Shaftesbury peremptorily insisted in forcing it upon us, and demanded the presence of a short-hand writer in order to give it publicity. It is much to be regretted that the representatives of the Society only now, for the first time, make the acknowledgment that they left us alone to protest against the introduction of “a personal matter in no way affecting the questions under inquiry.”
On Friday, the 20th July, the “Record” published an article, with a letter from Lord Shaftesbury, attacking the Bishop of Rochester and his colleagues, to which the following reply was sent, and refused insertion by the Editor :—
Sir,
Having seen a statement, with a letter from Lord Shaftesbury, in your paper of Friday, 20th instant, in which our names are introduced, we appeal to your sense of justice to insert this accompanying statement in explanation and vindication of the course we have pursued, with reference to the distressed family of the Rosenthals, and the Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews.
P.S.—The absence of the Bishop of Rochester from England, and of others from London, obliges us to send this without waiting for their signatures.
The Editor of the “Record.”
Our attention has been called to a statement in the “Record” of the 20th inst, respecting the proceedings of the Conference held with the President and five other members of the Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews on the Rosenthal case.
We fully understood that the Conference was to be a private and friendly one—an opinion fortified by Lord Shaftesbury's statement at the opening of the Conference, that all that passed would be strictly confidential.
As friends of the cause of Israel, we were most anxious that nothing should be done that could in any way injure that cause or weaken the Society. But we are compelled to state, that not only have we hitherto failed in bringing the members of the Conference, who were acting for the Society, to consider the real question at issue, but we have been met in so hostile a spirit, and subjected to such unworthy insinuations, that nothing but a stern conviction that we were bound to bring forward the facts with which we were acquainted, and to exhaust all means to obtain redress for the Rosenthals, could have induced us to persevere as we have. It has been at a great personal sacrifice of time and feelings that we have carried on the matter, and without any other motive than to show how deeply the cause of God and Israel had suffered from the course pursued by the agents of the Society.
We will not enter into any details as to merely personal matters, but at once refer to one charge that may require explanation.
Dr. Macgowan, formerly head of the Society's mission at Jerusalem, has
