m 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 la