Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: STEVENSON AND FATHER DAMIEN THE Rev. Dr. Charles McEwen Hyde, while in this country, just after the Stevenson episode, spent an entire morning with me, in my study, at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where at the time I was pastor of the First Congregational Church. He gave me the entire story of Stevenson's brutal letter, and the controversy that ensued, from first to last. I asked him many questions, all of which he answered promptly and at length. I rose from that interview absolutely certain in my mind that everything Dr. Hyde had said of Damien in his letter to the Rev. H. B. Gage (published in The Sydney Presbyterian for October 26, 1889) was true. Through the entire conversation, Dr. Hyde spoke in the spirit of kindness and Christian charity of both Damien and Stevenson, and I discovered in all that he had to say nothing bearing the slightest approach to a bitter or vindictive temper. Whether it was wise at the time and under the circumstances to write the letter he addressed to Mr. Gage is another question, and one I am not competent to answer. Dr. Hyde wrote the letter from a sense of duty, and never, so far as I know, did he regret the sending of it, or wish that its statements had been in any wise different. Stevenson's letter was, I am fully persuaded, more the work of the rhetorician than of the man. He was carried away by the opportunity of making a rhetorical flourish and impression, and so went farther than he intended to go, and much farther than his own judgment approved. I think he regretted the letter, and would have been glad to recall it had recall been possible. I also think that had he lived he would have made some kind of an apology. Stevenson was a man of many noble qualities, and conscience was not wanting as an element of power in his life, but h...