FATHER DAMIEN.*
THE Rev. Hugh Chapman and Mr. Clifford have had the credit of making Father Damien's unique self-sacrifice known to the Anglican Church. Indeed, the former has materially aided Father Damien's work for the lepers of the Sandwich Islands by raising a considerable sum for him in this country ; while the latter has actually visited him in his home, and seen with his own eyes that indefatigable zeal and charity which sustained Father Damien to the very moment of his own death from leprosy in the service of the lepers to whom he consecrated the latter part of his life, and for whom he died. It is pleasant to find men belonging to other Churches than the Roman Catholic,—speaking, indeed, frankly enough of their differences with Roman Catholics,—bearing this ungrudging testimony to the saintly zeal of a Roman Catholic. Indeed, Mr. Clifford, who is an artist, is so much in dread of being supposed to be a Roman Catholic simply because he speaks of Father Damien with the deepest reverence, that he makes a little confession
• Falser Damien: a humpy front Cashews to his Home in Hawaii. By Edward Clifford. London: Macmillan and Co.
of faith in his introductory chapter by way of protest against that inference :—
"When I was a little boy I thought that all Roman Catholics were wicked, and went steadily to hell. If I saw- a nun I thought she wanted to catch me and burn me. The glaring redness of Bloody Mary was unrelieved by any quieter colour. As I grew older I found I had been mistaken. I read Charles Kingsley's Hermits, and the lives of St. Francis and St. Catherine of Sienna. I read Thomas d Kempis, and I found that the Church of Rome had undoubtedly produced saints. A revulsion of feeling often sets in when young people find their teachers have not told them the whole truth about religious matters. Unfairness and untruth bring their punishment with the same unerringness as that with which an apple falls to the ground, and often the desire to make amends for past injustice turns the heart towards the Church of Rome, with all its romance and bewitchingness, and against Protestantism, with its gravity and its unbending opposition to certain pleasant errors. Moreover, there are many persons who are more anxious to submit to authority than to question its claims to their obedience. To some it is even a luxury to assent to what they more than half think is untrue. They consider their sub- mission a sacrifice of sense to devotion, forgetting that they are called to worship God with all their mind as well as with all their heart. If their newly chosen guide recommends the delivering up of their Bible, then they willingly let their Bible go. The distress or persecution of friends is but the incentive which finally seals their act and fixes it steadily on the ground of mar- tyrdom. They become earnest disciples, and often they become beautiful souls. It is not well to dissuade such persons from their secession by any other means than the simple telling of the truth. It is better that they should do what they think is right, even if they find out later that it was wrong, and that they must retrace their steps. The way to truth may be blessedly painful, but it will be trodden sooner or later if the soul loves truth. God teaches slowly."
Mr. Clifford afterwards gives his reasons for a difference of principle with the Church of Rome. The first is, that Roman Catholics inquire first not what is right and wrong to their own consciences, but what the Church teaches to be so, and that of this he cannot approve ; the second is, that the Church discourages the reading of the Bible, though it does not frankly admit this ; the third is, that it leads priests into moral danger by requiring the clergy to remain celibate; the fourth is, that it does not allow Roman Catholics to unite in worship with those who are not Roman Catholics even in the saying of such prayers as the Lord's Prayer, which all Christians regard as the expression of a true faith ; and the fifth is, that the Roman Catholics are more disposed to worship the Virgin Mary than our Lord. Some of these reasons, certainly the first and fourth, seem to us better than the others. Of the fact asserted in the last objection, so far as it applies to Roman Catholics of any education and intelligence, we may, indeed, well have reasonable doubts. But we do believe that the Church's claim of infallibility is a false claim, and that it actually leads to the explaining away of false steps taken by the Church at different times, which is a course extremely prejudicial to her humility, and even to her sanctity ; and we have never had the smallest glimpse of a good reason or a plausible reason why the Roman Church will not allow her children to join in prayers with those whom she thinks heretics, even when the prayer joined in is one of her own prayers. That seems to us an act of deliberate Pharisaism. Neverthe- less, we do not believe that the Roman Church discourages the reading of the New Testament by her people. On the con- trary, we have always heard that she eagerly encourages it; and as for the Old Testament, there is so much in it that does tend to mislead the half-educated, that we are not at all sure that she is wrong in taking great precautions on the subject. But Mr. Clifford must admit,—at all events, we fully admit, —that though a Father Damien might have been possible,—we hope, more than possible,—in other Churches, it was at least much more likely that he would arise in a Church which deliberately asks for the sacrifice of the whole lives of her priests to their work, and which teaches them that the Church can never err, than in any Church which admits priests who live all sorts of easy and luxurious lives, and who treat the authority of the Church they serve with something very like indifference. We quite agree that the Roman Church suffers, and suffers gravely, both from claiming an infallibility which she has not got, and from asking from her priests an utter devotion of life of which many men are hardly capable; but in both cases, though she loses much, she gains much too, and it is no wonder that Father Damiens are commoner in the Roman Church than in the Anglican.
This little book needs supplementing by the letters which have recently been published from Father Damien to his father and mother and brothetand it is a pity that some Life of the greatest Christian hero of our time should not appear which should contain both what Mr. Clifford gives us and the family correspondence. Mr. Clifford has the eye of an artist for his subject. The scenery of the Sandwich Islands, and particularly of Molokai, is described with great vivacity and power ; the account of Father Damien himself is very impressive; and many details are given us which make the present life of the poor lepers more or less vivid to us. For example :—
"Christmas Day was, of course, a feast, and in the evening the lepers had an entertainment and acted little scenes in their biggest hall. The ariston played its best between whiles. To English people it would probably have seemed a dreary entertainment, but the excitement was great. Belshazzar's feast was a truly wonderful representation, and not much more like Belshazzar's feast than like most other scenes. The stage was very dark, and all the lepers seemed to take their turns in walking on and off it. Belshazzar had his face down on the table, buried in his arms, nearly all the time, and it really seemed as if he might be asleep. Nobody did anything particular, and it was difficult to say who was intended for Daniel. I think the queen-mother was a little boy. The fathers were on very affectionate, playful terms with the lepers. I found Father Conradi one morning making a list of the boys' names, which I think are worth recording with some others that I got from Mr. Sproul]. and Dr. Nicholls. It must be remembered that they are boys' names : Jane Peter, Henry Ann, Sit-in-the- cold, The Rat-eater, The Eyes-of-the-fire, A Fall-from-a-horse, Mrs. Tompkins, The Heaven-has-been-talking, Susan, The Window, The wandering Ghost, The first Nose, The tenth Heaven, The Dead-house, The white Bird, The Bird-of-water, the River-of- truth, The Emetic. The following names were found by Dr. Nicholls at Honolulu : Mr. Scissors, Mrs. Oyster, The Fool, The Man who washes his Dimples, The tired Lizard, The Atlantic Ocean, The Stomach, The great Kettle, Poor Pussy, The Pigsty.
The account of the great lake of fire in the volcano of Kilauea is very effective. Take the following, for example :—
" The lava is as liquid as thick soup, and of a bluish gray colour, with occasional greenish tints. It keeps simmering and heaving, and then it breaks in all directions into most lovely vermilion cracks, changing into violet, and then into dead gray. All the time a roaring sound goes on like the roaring of the sea. Wherever the slightly cooling crust cracks it is red-hot. And now, as one watches, a scarlet fountain begins to play in the middle of the lake. At first it is about two feet high, with golden spray, then it gets wilder and larger and more tumultuous, tossing itself up into the air with a beautiful sportiveness—great twistings of fiery liquid spring into the air, like serpents and griffins. It is terrible. It is splendid. It is exquisite. And it is almost in- describable. I visited the volcano six times, and generally saw some of these fire fountains, and the roaring, tossing waves at the edge of the volcano never ceased. Sometimes a thin blue flame breaks through the cracks or roars up through a chimney at the side. All around the lake is a deposit of Pele's hair,' a dun- coloured glassy thread that is always ready to stick into one's hand, with numberless little points. In some places it lies so thick that it looks like a blanket of disagreeable tawny fur."
Mr. Clifford's picture of the diffuseness of the natives in exhausting the negative side of a subject on which probably they have nothing to say that is positive, is very interesting, and a great warning against what talk indulged in for its own sake, even by a people who have had no Parliamentary educa- tion, may bring men to :— "Nearly all the natives make speeches, but with little matter in them, and full of negatives. What do I say of Queen Pikiliki ? That she is a tall woman, with red hair and tusks? No. Do I say that she has only one leg ? No.' And so on indefinitely. With all their weaknesses, however, I think that Hawaiians are the most charming natives I ever saw."
We only hope that our Parliamentary obstructives will not take a hint from that. It would give the Speaker and the Chairman of Committees a great deal of trouble if Members
contradicted all that they did not intend to say, before they began to affirm what they did intend to say. If they ever
took to such a practice, the House would probably be driven to expelling them wholesale. But there is great ingenuity in the idea. If you want to talk for talking's sake, how can you do better than deny beforehand all the nonsense that you can even imagine yourself to talk ? That a people who can wander into endless loquacity in this way should still be so loveable, is a very remarkable fact. But it is clear that Father Damien, with all the depth and earnestness of his singularly noble and pure character, loved them with all the power of which that character was capable.
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