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Updated: August 24, 2024
'La Journee, said Damien, 'La journee sera dure, mais elle se passera.
As to what he would do when he was a man, he said nothing, and his parents said nothing either. On January 3, 1860, Joseph was nineteen, and Monsieur Damien proposed to take him as a birthday treat to see his brother, and to leave the two together while he went to the town on some business. It was a long time since they had met, and there was much to ask and hear.
We visited the cemetery and saw the monument erected to the memory of a Catholic priest, Father Damien, who went there from Chicago, to devote his life to the spiritual care of the unfortunates, but who, like all others residing on the island, finally succumbed to the disease. We met an old lady at the cemetery and I asked her if there was any danger of contracting the disease.
I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao. A. "Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in the field of his labours and sufferings. 'He was a good man, but very officious, says one. A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was a popular." He was rough in his ways, and he had no control.
Inland there are dense groves of trees, huge tree-ferns, and thick matted creepers. Here brilliant-plumaged birds have their home, while about the cliffs fly the long-tailed white bo'sun birds; but as a whole Molokai cannot compare in beauty with the islands which Father Damien had left behind him. A hospital had been built for the worst cases, and when Father Damien arrived it was quite full.
The eager young writer, just beginning a literary career, might fix his eyes upon Francis Thompson rather than upon Sir Hall Caine; the eager young clergyman might dream dreams over the Life of Father Damien more often than over the Life of the Archbishop of Canterbury; but to what star can the eager young barrister hitch his wagon, save to the star of material success?
And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to forget the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of mind. Damien was COARSE. It is very possible.
Did we desire to realize what the religious life could be? Then let us reflect upon the news which had come from the South Seas. What was the word that had fallen that morning on all Christendom like a thunderclap, say, rather, like the blast of a celestial trumpet? Father Damien was dead! Think of his lonely life in that distant island where doomed men lived out their days.
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.
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.
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