Father Damien

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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


{1} From the Sydney _Presbyterian_, October 26, 1889.