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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: 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 the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of
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