Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I have read that when Robert Louis Stevenson visited the island of the lepers where Father Damien did his illustrious work he played croquet with the children, using the same mallets that they used; and when it was suggested that he put gloves upon his hands he refused to do so because, he said, "it will remind them the more of the difference between us."
Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity of a peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do. For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character, should have avoided him in life.
John was silent, his head was down, but the Prime Minister could see that his words took no effect. Then his bleak old face smiled a wintry smile as he said: "But you are not mending much in one way, my boy. Do you know you've never once been here since the day you came to tell me you were to be married, and intended to follow in the footsteps of Father Damien?"
The Black Prince waited behind the chair of his captive; Villars interchanged repartees with Eugene; George II. sent congratulations to Louis XV., during a war, upon occasion of his escape from the attempt of Damien: and these things are fine and generous, and very gratifying to the author of the Broad Stone of Honour, and all the other wise men who think, like him, that God made the world only for the use of gentlemen.
Opposite was the Church of St. Pierre, dating from the fifteenth century, a very noble building, with many chapels filled with carvings of the time of the Renaissance in wood, stone, and iron. In the university were one hundred and fifty thousand volumes. Near it was the bronze statue of Father Damien, priest of the leper colony in the South Pacific, of whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote.
I did not find one person in the Sandwich Islands who had the least doubt as to leprosy being contagious, though it is possible to be exposed to the disease for years without contracting it. Father Damien told me that he had always expected that he should sooner or later become a leper, though exactly how he caught it he does not know.
We have all heard of Father Damien, who banished himself to the isle of Molokai, where the outcast lepers of the Sandwich Islands had been herded to rot and die; and there taking up his abode, soon changed the lepers, who were living like wild beasts, without law or morality, into gentle and fervent Christians.
It was, however, so large that Father Damien said it would be impossible for his lepers either to land it from the boat or to carry it to Kalawao, and that it must be returned to the steamer and landed on some voyage when the sea was quieter.
Harley was laid up more than twenty days by the wound which he received from Guiscard;" while "the scratch which Damien gave to Louis the Fifteenth was so slight that it was followed by no feverish symptoms."
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.
Word Of The Day