BROOKLYN, N.Y., JANUARY 6TH, 1943
BROOKLYN, N.Y., JANUARY 6TH, 1943
Beloved Brother, — I duly received your letters of October 13th and December 4th, and I am touched by the humble attitude as to the distressing situation in the Stow Hill Depot expressed in both. I should have replied to the first earlier only I was awaiting the answer from the trustees to my letter of October 31st. This came lately and it confirms what you wrote of your own exercises.
I am writing the trustees to express my thankfulness for the lowly character of your regrets and confessions. I am waiting on the Lord as to the whole matter — that I may have a right judgment of what you have written — that I may be fair, and free to pray for you without reserve as I am able to see that you are with God.
No one should have a better knowledge than you of the moral and business principles entering into the management of a Tract Depot — an institution possessing a levitical and hence a holy character. Mutual feeling and consideration in those responsibly active as excluding all personal exploitation is essential to the success of such a service through the blessing of God. I assumed the Stow Hill Depot possessed all these features and placed the most implicit confidence in the trustees and in yourself. So that there was no need for any one to apologise for you to me. As you know, I said to ——— more than once as to the changes made in the magazine that you must have thought that they represented my mind, although I had no ground for saying this save confidence in your integrity.
But as other similar alterations came to light my mind was forced to the opposite view; and at the present moment a [p. 300] certain anxious inquiry lurks in it: How could a brother long experienced in critical examinations and revisions change a statement of another to an opposite meaning four or five times in the same number of papers in the hands of the former for publication, the changes in each case being practically identical, and supportive of a special view or doctrine held by the brother who made the changes, and yet within a comparatively short period afterwards the brother cannot tell why he made them?
Another thing weighing on my mind is a letter from Mr. G——— written shortly after he had a long conversation with you at your request, and after Mr. G——— had conferred with the trustees concerning my letter to them regarding the many changes made in the book ‘The Second Established’. Mr. G——— says you had no explanation to offer as to the changes you made in the magazines and booklet, and as to those made in the Notes on Job, you said you thought you were expected to make them — notwithstanding that you wrote and cabled to me that what you did on such productions was nothing or negligible. Mr. G——— stressed the so-called extenuating circumstances, and intimated that these largely cancelled the wrongdoing; and that while you felt things before God, the whole matter was a surprise to you, although also a ‘calamity’.
The true way to reach a result as to extenuating circumstances is to weigh them separately and deduct the total from the total facts: thus if you were requested to take care of ‘errors and omissions’ in an article and you make instead almost a re-revision, involving 140 changes, saying at the same time that you made no changes at all in such MSS., the extenuating circumstances are hardly worth mentioning.
You have been ill from time to time and you are the subject of prayer by the brethren on this account. I trust your health is improved. You are a comparatively young man, your mind clear and energetic, and as helped of God, who is ever available to us, you should, it seems to me, have been able to meet this whole matter as it arose in a more practical and definite way. You have been resentful because, as you said, you have been questioned for doing what you had been doing for ten years. The questioning has been almost entirely by me, and I had not the slightest idea that your methods were such as they have been shown to have been. As the full truth came to light I [p. 301] was convinced that the Lord was calling attention to them, and hence I wrote plainly, for I believed the enemy was advantaged by the liberties taken with manuscripts (sent to the Depot) without the knowledge of their authors. The knowledge and experience you possessed should have prevented this. Had they acted, the current sorrow would have been averted.
Affectionately in Him,
James Taylor.