n 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.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FATHER DAMIEN***

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