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—­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 wellbeing, 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 last man on earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would and did.