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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Father Damien, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Father Damien
+       an Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 28, 2007  [eBook #281]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FATHER DAMIEN***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1914 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+FATHER DAMIEN
+AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND DOCTOR HYDE OF HONOLULU
+FROM
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+
+1914
+LONDON
+CHATTO & WINDUS
+
+A new impression
+All rights reserved
+
+SYDNEY,
+_February_ 25, 1890.
+
+Sir,--It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited, and
+conversed; on my side, with interest.  You may remember that you have
+done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be grateful.  But
+there are duties which come before gratitude, and offences which justly
+divide friends, far more acquaintances.  Your letter to the Reverend H.
+B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had filled me with bread
+when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse my father when he lay a-
+dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of gratitude.  You know
+enough, doubtless, of the process of canonisation to be aware that, a
+hundred years after the death of Damien, there will appear a man charged
+with the painful office of the _devil's advocate_.  After that noble
+brother of mine, and of all frail clay, shall have lain a century at
+rest, one shall accuse, one defend him.  The circumstance is unusual that
+the devil's advocate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect
+immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly
+office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall
+leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me inspiring.  If I
+have at all learned the trade of using words to convey truth and to
+arouse emotion, you have at last furnished me with a subject.  For it is
+in the interest of all mankind, and the cause of public decency in every
+quarter of the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but that
+you and your letter should be displayed at length, in their true colours,
+to the public eye.
+
+To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then
+proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine
+and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and with
+more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has pleased
+you to vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you for ever.
+
+   "HONOLULU,
+   "_August_ 2, 1889.
+
+   "Rev. H. B. GAGE.
+
+   "Dear Brother,--In answer to your inquires about Father Damien, I can
+   only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant
+   newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist.  The
+   simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted.
+   He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not
+   stay at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but
+   circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the island is
+   devoted to the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu.  He had no hand
+   in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of
+   our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided.  He
+   was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of
+   which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.
+   Other have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government
+   physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting
+   eternal life.--Yours, etc.,
+
+   "C. M. HYDE" {1}
+
+To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the outset
+on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect.  It may offend
+others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect, so bold to
+publish, gossip on your rivals.  And this is perhaps the moment when I
+may best explain to you the character of what you are to read: I conceive
+you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility: with what
+measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again; with you, at
+last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home.  And
+if in aught that I shall say I should offend others, your colleagues,
+whom I respect and remember with affection, I can but offer them my
+regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration of interests
+far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by anything from me
+must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain with which they read
+your letter.  It is not the hangman, but the criminal, that brings
+dishonour on the house.
+
+You belong, sir, to a sect--I believe my sect, and that in which my
+ancestors laboured--which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise, and
+exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii.  The first missionaries
+came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody
+faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm; what
+troubles they supported came far more from whites than from Hawaiians;
+and to these last they stood (in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.
+This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their
+failure, such as it is.  One element alone is pertinent, and must here be
+plainly dealt with.  In the course of their evangelical calling, they--or
+too many of them--grew rich.  It may be news to you that the houses of
+missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of Honolulu.  It will
+at least be news to you, that when I returned your civil visit, the
+driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste, and the comfort of
+your home.  It would have been news certainly to myself, had any one told
+me that afternoon that I should live to drag such a matter into print.
+But you see, sir, how you degrade better men to your own level; and it is
+needful that those who are to judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien
+and the devil's advocate, should understand your letter to have been
+penned in a house which could raise, and that very justly, the envy and
+the comments of the passers-by.  I think (to employ a phrase of yours
+which I admire) it "should be attributed" to you that you have never
+visited the scene of Damien's life and death.  If you had, and had
+recalled it, and looked about your pleasant rooms, even your pen perhaps
+would have been stayed.
+
+Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine) has not
+done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom.  When calamity
+befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended and took root
+in the Eight Islands, a _quid pro quo_ was to be looked for.  To that
+prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its adornments, God had sent at
+last an opportunity.  I know I am touching here upon a nerve acutely
+sensitive.  I know that others of your colleagues look back on the
+inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien,
+with something almost to be called remorse.  I am sure it is so with
+yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not
+essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that
+performance.  You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that
+which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not
+rendered.  _Time was_, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room,
+as you sat raging and writing; and if the words written were base beyond
+parallel, the rage, I am happy to repeat--it is the only compliment I
+shall pay you--the rage was almost virtuous.  But, sir, when we have
+failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has
+stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a
+plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and
+succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted
+in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour--the battle cannot be
+retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested.  It is a lost battle,
+and lost for ever.  One thing remained to you in your defeat--some rags
+of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.
+
+Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but the
+honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the
+inert: that was what remained to you.  We are not all expected to be
+Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his
+comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that.  But will a
+gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example from the fields
+of gallantry?  When two gentlemen compete for the favour of a lady, and
+the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as will sometimes
+happen) matter damaging to the successful rival's credit reaches the ear
+of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no pretensions that his mouth
+is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily closed.  Your Church and
+Damien's were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help, to edify, to
+set divine examples.  You having (in one huge instance) failed, and
+Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have occurred to you that you
+were doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped in that high
+rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your well-being, in your
+pleasant room--and Damien, crowned with glories and horrors, toiled and
+rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of Kalawao--you, the elect
+who would not, were the last man on earth to collect and propagate gossip
+on the volunteer who would and did.
+
+I think I see you--for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these
+sentences--I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical
+expression at the best.  "He had no hand in the reforms," he was "a
+coarse, dirty man"; these were your own words; and you may think it
+possible that I am come to support you with fresh evidence.  In a sense,
+it is even so.  Damien has been too much depicted with a conventional
+halo and conventional features; so drawn by men who perhaps had not the
+eye to remark or the pen to express the individual; or who perhaps were
+only blinded and silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy
+for myself--such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on
+your bended knees.  It is the least defect of such a method of
+portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate, and
+leaves the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of truth.  For
+the truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the
+enemy.  The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if
+your letter be the means of substituting once for all a credible likeness
+for a wax abstraction.  For, if that world at all remember you, on the
+day when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue
+of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.
+
+You may ask on what authority I speak.  It was my inclement destiny to
+become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde.  When I visited
+the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave.  But such
+information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those
+who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but
+others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no
+halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose
+unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features
+of the man shone on me convincingly.  These gave me what knowledge I
+possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely
+and sensitively understood--Kalawao, which you have never visited, about
+which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself; for,
+brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into that
+confession.  "_Less than one-half_ of the island," you say, "is devoted
+to the lepers."  Molokai--"_Molokai ahina_," the "grey," lofty, and most
+desolate island--along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice
+into a sea of unusual profundity.  This range of cliff is, from east to
+west, the true end and frontier of the island.  Only in one spot there
+projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy,
+stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the
+whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
+as a bracket to a wall.  With this hint you will now be able to pick out
+the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how much of Molokai
+is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whether less than a half,
+or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth--or, say a twentieth; and
+the next time you burst into print you will be in a position to share
+with us the issue of your calculations.
+
+I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness of
+that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold.  You,
+who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce
+sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your
+pleasant parlour on Beretania Street.  When I was pulled ashore there one
+early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding
+farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human
+life.  One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from
+joining her.  Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have
+triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you
+beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common
+manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population as
+only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare--what a
+haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards
+the house on Beretania Street!  Had you gone on; had you found every
+fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and
+seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but
+still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have
+understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves
+of a man's spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of
+the sun; you would have felt it was (even today) a pitiful place to visit
+and a hell to dwell in.  It is not the fear of possible infection.  That
+seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the
+disgust of the visitor's surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction,
+disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes.  I do not think I am
+a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the days and nights I
+spent upon that island promontory (eight days and seven nights), without
+heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere else.  I find in my diary that
+I speak of my stay as a "grinding experience": I have once jotted in the
+margin, "_Harrowing_ is the word"; and when the _Mokolii_ bore me at last
+towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new
+conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the song--
+
+   "'Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen."
+
+And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,
+bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the Bishop-
+Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries,
+all indefatigable in their noble tasks.  It was a different place when
+Damien came there and made this great renunciation, and slept that first
+night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence;
+and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of
+dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.
+
+You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound
+in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses.  I
+have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses.  But
+there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and
+Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of
+length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression; for
+what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering by
+which he stands surrounded.  Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called upon to
+enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say farewell,
+they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time
+to their high calling, and can look forward as they go to relief, to
+recreation, and to rest.  But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors
+of his own sepulchre.
+
+I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.
+
+_A_.  "Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in the
+field of his labours and sufferings.  'He was a good man, but very
+officious,' says one.  Another tells me he had fallen (as other priests
+so easily do) into something of the ways and habits of thought of a
+Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact, and the good sense to
+laugh at" [over] "it.  A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was
+a popular."
+
+_B_.  "After Ragsdale's death" [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or overseer,
+of the unruly settlement] "there followed a brief term of office by
+Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness of that noble
+man.  He was rough in his ways, and he had no control.  Authority was
+relaxed; Damien's life was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign."
+
+_C_.  "Of Damien I begin to have an idea.  He seems to have been a man of
+the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type: shrewd, ignorant and
+bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of receiving and digesting a
+reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly generous in the least
+thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready to give his last shirt
+(although not without human grumbling) as he had been to sacrifice his
+life; essentially indiscreet and officious, which made him a troublesome
+colleague; domineering in all his ways, which made him incurably
+unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute of real authority, so that
+his boys laughed at him and he must carry out his wishes by the means of
+bribes.  He learned to have a mania for doctoring; and set up the Kanakas
+against the remedies of his regular rivals: perhaps (if anything matter
+at all in the treatment of such a disease) the worst thing that he did,
+and certainly the easiest.  The best and worst of the man appear very
+plainly in his dealings with Mr. Chapman's money; he had originally laid
+it out" [intended to lay it out] "entirely for the benefit of Catholics,
+and even so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his
+error fully and revised the list.  The sad state of the boys' home is in
+part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly ways
+and false ideas of hygiene.  Brother officials used to call it 'Damien's
+Chinatown.'  'Well,' they would say, 'your Chinatown keeps growing.'  And
+he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his errors with
+perfect obstinacy.  So much I have gathered of truth about this plain,
+noble human brother and father of ours; his imperfections are the traits
+of his face, by which we know him for our fellow; his martyrdom and his
+example nothing can lessen or annul; and only a person here on the spot
+can properly appreciate their greatness."
+
+I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without
+correction; thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness.  They
+are almost a list of the man's faults, for it is rather these that I was
+seeking: with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life, I and the
+world were already sufficiently acquainted.  I was besides a little
+suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely because
+Damien's admirers and disciples were the least likely to be critical.  I
+know you will be more suspicious still; and the facts set down above were
+one and all collected from the lips of Protestants who had opposed the
+father in his life.  Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up the
+image of a man, with all his weakness, essentially heroic, and alive with
+rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.
+
+Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides of
+Damien's character, collected from the lips of those who had laboured
+with and (in your own phrase) "knew the man";--though I question whether
+Damien would have said that he knew you.  Take it, and observe with
+wonder how well you were served by your gossips, how ill by your
+intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of fact we are at one, and
+how widely our appreciations vary.  There is something wrong here; either
+with you or me.  It is possible, for instance, that you, who seem to have
+so many ears in Kalawao, had heard of the affair of Mr. Chapman's money,
+and were singly struck by Damien's intended wrong-doing.  I was struck
+with that also, and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the
+fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced.  I may here tell
+you that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him
+late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the
+father listened as usual with "perfect good-nature and perfect
+obstinacy"; but at the last, when he was persuaded--"Yes," said he, "I am
+very much obliged to you; you have done me a service; it would have been
+a theft."  There are many (not Catholics merely) who require their heroes
+and saints to be infallible; to these the story will be painful; not to
+the true lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind.
+
+And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those
+who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to find
+and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to forget
+the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone introduced
+them to your knowledge.  It is a dangerous frame of mind.  That you may
+understand how dangerous, and into what a situation it has already
+brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand through the
+different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each from the
+point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.
+
+   Damien was _coarse_.
+
+It is very possible.  You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a
+coarse old peasant for their friend and father.  But you, who were so
+refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of
+culture?  Or may I remind you that we have some reason to doubt if John
+the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter, on whose career your
+doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt at all he was a
+"coarse, headstrong" fisherman!  Yet even in our Protestant Bibles Peter
+is called Saint.
+
+   Damien was _dirty_.
+
+He was.  Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!  But
+the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.
+
+   Damien was _headstrong_.
+
+I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head and
+heart.
+
+   Damien was _bigoted_.
+
+I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me.  But
+what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish in a
+priest?  Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity of a
+peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do.  For this, I
+wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character, should
+have avoided him in life.  But the point of interest in Damien, which has
+caused him to be so much talked about and made him at last the subject of
+your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry, his intense and narrow
+faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened him to be one of the
+world's heroes and exemplars.
+
+   Damien _was not sent to Molokai_, _but went there without orders_.
+
+Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame?  I have
+heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for imitation on the
+ground that His sacrifice was voluntary.  Does Dr. Hyde think otherwise?
+
+   Damien _did not stay at the settlement_, _etc._
+
+It is true he was allowed many indulgences.  Am I to understand that you
+blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers for granting
+them?  In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard to issue from the
+house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you will find yourself with
+few supporters.
+
+   Damien _had no hand in the reforms_, _etc._
+
+I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my
+description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up upon this
+head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere in the
+world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than when he
+passes from Damien's "Chinatown" at Kalawao to the beautiful Bishop-Home
+at Kalaupapa.  At this point, in my desire to make all fair for you, I
+will break my rule and adduce Catholic testimony.  Here is a passage from
+my diary about my visit to the Chinatown, from which you will see how it
+is (even now) regarded by its own officials: "We went round all the
+dormitories, refectories, etc.--dark and dingy enough, with a superficial
+cleanliness, which he" [Mr. Dutton, the lay-brother] "did not seek to
+defend.  'It is almost decent,' said he; 'the sisters will make that all
+right when we get them here.'"  And yet I gathered it was already better
+since Damien was dead, and far better than when he was there alone and
+had his own (not always excellent) way.  I have now come far enough to
+meet you on a common ground of fact; and I tell you that, to a mind not
+prejudiced by jealousy, all the reforms of the lazaretto, and even those
+which he most vigorously opposed, are properly the work of Damien.  They
+are the evidence of his success; they are what his heroism provoked from
+the reluctant and the careless.  Many were before him in the field; Mr.
+Meyer, for instance, of whose faithful work we hear too little: there
+have been many since; and some had more worldly wisdom, though none had
+more devotion, than our saint.  Before his day, even you will confess,
+they had effected little.  It was his part, by one striking act of
+martyrdom, to direct all men's eyes on that distressful country.  At a
+blow, and with the price of his life, he made the place illustrious and
+public.  And that, if you will consider largely, was the one reform
+needful; pregnant of all that should succeed.  It brought money; it
+brought (best individual addition of them all) the sisters; it brought
+supervision, for public opinion and public interest landed with the man
+at Kalawao.  If ever any man brought reforms, and died to bring them, it
+was he.  There is not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop-Home, but dirty
+Damien washed it.
+
+   Damien _was not a pure man in his relations with women_, _etc._
+
+How do you know that?  Is this the nature of conversation in that house
+on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving past?--racy details
+of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest, toiling under the cliffs of
+Molokai?
+
+Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have heard the
+rumour.  When I was there I heard many shocking tales, for my informants
+were men speaking with the plainness of the laity; and I heard plenty of
+complaints of Damien.  Why was this never mentioned? and how came it to
+you in the retirement of your clerical parlour?
+
+But I must not even seem to deceive you.  This scandal, when I read it in
+your letter, was not new to me.  I had heard it once before; and I must
+tell you how.  There came to Samoa a man from Honolulu; he, in a public-
+house on the beach, volunteered the statement that Damien had "contracted
+the disease from having connection with the female lepers"; and I find a
+joy in telling you how the report was welcomed in a public-house.  A man
+sprang to his feet; I am not at liberty to give his name, but from what I
+heard I doubt if you would care to have him to dinner in Beretania
+Street.  "You miserable little -------" (here is a word I dare not print,
+it would so shock your ears).  "You miserable little ------," he cried,
+"if the story were a thousand times true, can't you see you are a million
+times a lower ----- for daring to repeat it?"  I wish it could be told of
+you that when the report reached you in your house, perhaps after family
+worship, you had found in your soul enough holy anger to receive it with
+the same expressions; ay, even with that one which I dare not print; it
+would not need to have been blotted away, like Uncle Toby's oath, by the
+tears of the recording angel; it would have been counted to you for your
+brightest righteousness.  But you have deliberately chosen the part of
+the man from Honolulu, and you have played it with improvements of your
+own.  The man from Honolulu--miserable, leering creature--communicated
+the tale to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public-house,
+where (I will so far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not
+always at his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been
+drinking--drinking, we may charitably fancy, to excess.  It was to your
+"Dear Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage," that you chose to communicate
+the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns your portly bosom
+forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that you were drunk when it
+was done.  Your "dear brother"--a brother indeed--made haste to deliver
+up your letter (as a means of grace, perhaps) to the religious papers;
+where, after many months, I found and read and wondered at it; and whence
+I have now reproduced it for the wonder of others.  And you and your dear
+brother have, by this cycle of operations, built up a contrast very
+edifying to examine in detail.  The man whom you would not care to have
+to dinner, on the one side; on the other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and the
+Reverend H. B. Gage: the Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.
+
+But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men; and
+to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true.  I will
+suppose--and God forgive me for supposing it--that Damien faltered and
+stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror
+of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who was
+doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his
+priestly oath--he, who was so much a better man than either you or me,
+who did what we have never dreamed of daring--he too tasted of our common
+frailty.  "O, Iago, the pity of it!"  The least tender should be moved to
+tears; the most incredulous to prayer.  And all that you could do was to
+pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!
+
+Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your
+own heart?  I will try yet once again to make it clearer.  You had a
+father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it
+to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your
+emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that
+you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the
+author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would be to
+publish it in the religious press?  Well, the man who tried to do what
+Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and
+the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God
+had given you grace to see it.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes
+
+
+{1}  From the Sydney _Presbyterian_, October 26, 1889.
+
+
+
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