TO PRESIDENT BRIGHAM YOUNG:
Sir:—In reply to your note just received to preach in the Tabernacle to-morrow, I have to say that after disclaiming and declining, as you have done to-day, the discussion which I came here to hold, other arrangements to speak in the city were accepted by me, which will preclude my compliance with your invitation.
Respectfully,
J. P. NEWMAN.
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Salt Lake City, U. T., Aug. 6, 1870.
REV. DR. NEWMAN:
Sir:—In accordance with our usual custom of tendering clergymen of every denomination, passing through our city, the opportunity of preaching in our tabernacles of worship, I sent you, this afternoon, an invitation tendering you the use of the small Tabernacle in the morning, or the New Tabernacle in the afternoon, or both, at your pleasure, which you have seen proper to decline.
You charge me with "disclaiming and declining the discussion" which you came here to hold. I ask you, sir, what right have you to charge me with declining a challenge which I never gave you, or, to assume as a challenge from me, the writing of any unauthorized newspaper editor? Admitting that you could distort the article in question to be a challenge from me, (which I do not believe you conscientiously could) was it not the duty of a gentleman to ascertain whether I was responsible for the so-called challenge before your assumption of such a thing? And certainly much more so before making your false charges.
Your assertion that if you had not chosen to construe the article in question as a challenge from me, I "could then have adopted the 'Telegraph' as your [my] organ and the said article as a challenge," is an insinuation, in my judgment, very discreditable to yourself, and ungentlemanly in the extreme, and forces the conclusion that the author of it would not scruple to make use of such a subterfuge himself.