ear the city of Louvain a child was born, who came of
good stuff. He was educated for a business career, and there in
prosperous little Belgium the outlook at that time for wealth, for
social position, and for a life of joy was very bright. But at the age
of eighteen this boy offered himself for the priesthood of the Roman
Catholic Church. He joined the Society of the Sacred Heart. He went
out to the Hawaiian Islands as a missionary and was ordained as a
priest in the city of Honolulu.

He was at once impressed with the sad condition of the leper settlement
on the island of Molokai. He resolved to give his life to those poor,
diseased, horror-stricken people. He knew that to live among them
would mean banishment from his ordinary associations and the loss of
all possible preferment in the church. He knew that he might himself
contract that terrible disease and suffer a lingering, painful,
frightful death. "No matter," he cried, "I am going." And he went.

He not only preached to those lepers the Gospel of the Son of God and
ministered to them in spiritual things--his own labours and his appeals
to the Hawaiian government secured for them better dwellings, an
improved water supply, and a more generous provisioning of the unhappy
settlement. For five years he worked alone, but for the occasional
assistance of a priest who came to the colony for a single day. He
finally succumbed to the dread disease of leprosy and in his
forty-ninth year died a martyr to humane devotion. His name was Father
Damien, and he shed fresh luster upon the Christian ministry.

The young man who was born to the purple, called now to be a prophet of
God, seized upon the vital elements of religion and uttered them with
power. "What does it mean to be religious?" men were asking. Some of
the dull, blind priests of that day were saying, "It means sacrifice
and burnt offering. It means the careful and showy observance of the
forms of worship." Israel did not know; the people did not think.

Then this young prophet gave them the word of God with an edge on it.
He showed them the folly of all those outward signs of devotion apart
from the inward spirit of righteousness. "To what purpose is the
multitude of your sacrifices? Who hath required this at your hands?
When you spread forth your hands I will hide my eyes. When you make
many prayers I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash you,
make you clean. Put away the evil