Autograph copy of a letter signed : Burlington, to Bishop Johns, 1867 Nov. 2.

Concerning Bishop Johns' request for an assistant Bishop on the grounds of his advanced age and infirmity; asking for the certification of two physicians to attest to the infirmities or a statement from Bishop Johns; saying that "We have no right to consecrate an Assistant Bishop unless it plainly appears that the Convention acted under the conditions specified in the Canon. In your address you said nothing about your inability. You did indeed speak of your age being 71, but I am five years older, & yet should be quite unable to ask for an Assistant on the ground of physical incapacity. Neither did you request that you should have an Assistant, but left it to the Convention to decide the point, and that body, when it proceeded to act, were entirely silent with respect to the only fact which could canonically authorize the election;" adding that he is "very sorry to understand that my course in this matter has been attacked in your diocesan paper as a highhanded act of usurped authority. Assuredly my intentions, nor more absurd in itself, than such an imputation. If it were my desire to defeat the election, I should not have proposed a mode of supplying the defect, as I have done; concluding that he cannot grant his approval without "your own evidence, because I cannot take the opinion of the Standing Committee unsupported either by physicians or by yourself, as a fair equivalent for the voice of the Convention, although I doubt not, in the least, the perfect sincerity of the members of that Committee in making the declaration."