Father Damien | Project Gutenberg

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FATHER DAMIEN
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND DOCTOR HYDE OF HONOLULU
FROM
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
1914
london
chatto & windus
A new impression
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, an 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.
.  “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.”
.  “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.”
.  “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
From the Sydney
Presbyterian
, October 26, 1889.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 281 ***