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Your Lordship's Chaplain has now resorted to the public press; and, omitting all mention of what I have just replaced before your Lordship, has given to the world, as the result of the Conference, a one-sided, garbled account of the whole transaction.
This is a cruel and dishonourable violation of our agreement; and your Lordship will not be surprised that I hold your Lordship responsible for the conduct of your Chaplain.
Your lordship will have the goodness to consider this letter as a public letter.
To which the Bishop of Rochester replied as follows:—
My Lord,
I have become accustomed to experience surprise at your Lordship's communications, and regret that this emotion should be again excited by your Lordship's note of 21st July, which has just reached me.
That I should be responsible for what Mr. M'Caul may see fit to do in his private capacity is indeed a conclusion to which few but your Lordship would assent. He and his family are probably better acquainted with Jerusalem affairs than any other living parties in England; they uniformly manifested their interest in them publicly before Mr. M'Caul became my Chaplain; they are competent to act for themselves; and I am not aware that, by discharging a particular service in respect of my candidates for orders (which his residence in London makes most convenient for such candidates), Mr. M'Caul is debarred from freedom of opinion or action in matters with which I, as Bishop, have no direct connexion whatever. It has been as a friend of the cause of Israel, and not as a Bishop, that I was led into communication with your Lordship, and Mr. M'Caul has acted in his private and individual capacity in what he has done.
That Mr. M'Caul should be singled out as if he only had acted a one-sided part in this disagreeable business is indeed astonishing, when your Lordship has been the first to have recourse to printing a one-sided statement for the information of the Jews' Society, in which no reference was made to the replies which you had called for from Mr. M'Caul and myself—which you had promised we should have opportunity of making—and which we had made.
I decline to correspond further on this business, for reasons which have been fully assigned to those members of the Conference Committee who will henceforward carry on the correspondence, if further communications are needful.
I am, &c.
