The Missionaries (?) Sentenced for Murder.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1215, 2 December 1882, Page 2

The Missionaries (?) Sentenced for Murder.

We have been requested by a correspondent in Gisborne, to publish the following letter takmi from the Melbourne “Argus?'— TO THE KOtTOR or the AKGUB. Sir. The special telegrams in your Issue of to-day contain an announcement of “ Missionaries sentenced for murder,” and an extract appears in your columns from the “ St. James’s Budget ” of September Bth, on the punishment inflicted on “two African missionaries and their wives for horrible cruelty towards two native girls.” Will you allow me to send for insertion in your valuable paper a copy of a letter written by the secretary of the Church Missionary Society in London in reference to the above statements. Yours, etc., C. Stuart Perry. St. Jmhi’s Parsonage, Carlton, Oct. 27. [Copy]. TO THE EDITOR OF THE RECORD. Sir, My attention has been drawn to a paragraph in several newspapers, reflecting seriously on persons alleged to be missionaries of the Church Missionary Society at Sierra Leone. Fortunatus John and J. Williams are Africans, Both were at one time lay agents of this society. John was dismissed in 1875, three years before the alleged cruelties are stated to have ©ccurred. AVilliams withdrew from the service of the Society in 1880. Neither, therefore, ought to be described as agents of the Church Alissionary Society, much less as missionaries. Trusting to your well-known fairness .and desire for truth, may I ask you kindly to insert this explanation?—Yours, etc,, Henry Sutton, Secretary C.M.S. •Salisbury-square, Sept. 5, 1882.