ome 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 last man on earth to
collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would and did.

I think I see you--for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these
sentences--I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical
expression at the best. "He had no hand in the reforms," he was "a
coarse, dirty man"; these were your own words; and you may think it
possible that I am come to support you with fresh evidence. In a sense,
it is even so. Damien has been too much depicted with a conventional
halo and conventional features; so drawn by men who perhaps had not the
eye to remark or the pen to express the individual; or who perhaps were
only blinded and silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy
for myself--such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on
your bended knees. It is the least defect of such a method of
portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate, and
leaves for the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of truth.
For the truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of
the enemy. The world, in your despi