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I have always valued highly your Lordship's kindness and your good opinion, and I still desire to do so, consistently with what I deem to be the interests of truth, charity, and the Mission to the Jews. For this reason I request the favour of your Lordship to read the following account of the position which I have been led to occupy with reference to those interests, and to which, in good conscience, as at present informed, I think it is my duty to adhere.
I have been intimately acquainted with the late Dr. M'Caul since about 1840. I cannot yield to your Lordship in the regard and respect I have ever entertained for him.
1. He has repeatedly assured me that the Rosenthals were thoroughly respectable and Christian persons, who had been deeply injured by the Jerusalem Section of the London Jews' Society, and that the position which that section had taken up was a wrong one, and founded on false representations.
2. He has also stated to me, again and again, that, through the influence of that Section, the true system of dealing with the errors and mistaken views of the Jews had been compromised, and the power of influencing them towards the truth, as it is in Jesus, had been materially, if not fatally, impaired as regards the work of the London Jews' Society.
Dr. M'Caul's letters to the newspapers, after his controversy with the section in their Committee-room, prove such to have been his opinions.[1] Apart from these, he has alleged to me that their course of conduct in respect of the Operative Institution was another decisive proof of their erroneous judgment; and he has often stated his hopelessness of remedying such evils, because the Bishop of Jerusalem and Dr. Macgowan were determinately upholding the principles in Palestine which the Jerusalem section advocated here.
3. He has more than once expressed to me his deep persuasion that Jewish matters were not brought before your Lordship by the section in their simplicity and entirety, but partially, and by extracts from documents with important omissions, and that you often had no fair opportunity of judging concerning important interests which were at issue.
4. He has further expressed, clearly and fully, his conviction that it was useless for him, or anyone with his views, to make adverse representations to the section respecting measures they had adopted, because he and others had found that nothing which militated against their own system would be received and fairly weighed. On this account, and because of my last written paragraph, he believed that an appeal to your Lordship would be useless.
I have it under the hand of Mrs. M'Caul, his widow, that Dr. M'Caul discontinued his attendance at the Committee of the London Society in 1853 or ’4, because, after many similar hints, which no other member of that Committee attempted to gainsay, Mr. Strachan, the chairman, told him “That as the rest of the Committee were so happily unanimous, it was a pity that one dissentient member did not withdraw.” I may mention also that after a lengthened conversation on this subject at Palestine Place (after some of the Operative Society's proceedings) with Dr. M'Caul, Mr. Reichardt, and a third person—I think, Mr. Ayerst (whom I never knew well)—
- ↑ Jerusalem, &c. a Series of Letters by the late Rev. Alexander M'Caul, D.D. London: Trübner and Co. 60, Paternoster Row.
