Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

FATHER DAMIEN
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
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