Copy of a letter sent to the Rev. Thos. Kendall by Rev. Saml. Marsden, dated Sydney, June 11th, 1822.

I received your letter signed by yourself and Mr. Cowell, in which you make application to me to send you two carpenters to build you a church. When I compare your letter with the minutes of the last committee at Kiddee Kiddee, I am astonished that you should venture to make such an application to me under the circumstances you were in at the time you wrote.… . The statements of the minutes upon the melancholy subject, are supported by the general voice of all who visit New Zealand, as well as by the natives who are at Parramatta.

I would ask you what can you want a church for? What do you intend to preach? Is not your crime a public disgrace to the said ministry to which you have set apart? and will it not bring a curse page 211 and not a blessing upon all who do not separate from you, and fly your tent? I should expect to be consumed in your iniquity, if I did not immediately withdraw from you…… How do the enemies of the Gospel in New S. Wales blaspheme and triumph? I know not what to say to you. The deed is done—you have ruined yourself in this life, and lost your honourable and sacred rank in society, which you can never regain to the day of your death. You must be sensible that I have suffered many painful hours and days and months on account of the misconduct of some in the Mission, but this is the most painful circumstance that has happened. If one man sin against another, the judge shall judge him, but if a man sin against the Lord, who shall entreat for him? This is your awful case. Be assured your sin before the Lord is very great, for men will abhor the offering or the Lord. May God be merciful to you, and put away your sin that you may not die. I shall mourn for you as Samuel did for Saul. I beg to inform you that your application for a church I am bound by every principle of religion and propriety to refuse, and at the same time I feel it my painful duty to communicate to you, as agent to the C.M.S., that all intercourse between you and me must now cease, so long as those serious charges against you stand uncontradicted, and further, that you will now consider yourself suspended from duty as a missionary belonging to the C.M.S., until the pleasure of the Society is known. I feel it also my duty to call upon you to deliver up all the property in your possession of a public nature, to the existing committee for the time being.

While I lament your fall, more than any other man, on account of your distressed family, your own precious soul and the Mission, I am compelled to withdraw all public confidence, and countermand support from you until I receive instructions from the Committee at Home.