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
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--s