It is so easy to criticise men of this stamp because they have dared to break away from the conventional rendering of service only to the worthy. It is so easy to cry that they are doing more harm than good. But those who know the work and know the hearts that are constantly being touched and molded into betterment by it are better able to judge of its higher results.
Shall I hesitate to render service because I myself am not perfect? Shall I refuse to give the shivering and hungry beggar on the street a twenty-five cent meal ticket because I myself am not free from debt? Shall I refuse to guide the lost wayfarer because I myself do not know all the winding pathways of life?
By no means! Let me do the best I may while I may, and seize every opportunity that arises. It was a Christian minister that dared to rebuke Father Damien by claiming that he was not immaculate in his service to the repulsive and loathsome lepers of Molokai. And it was Robert Louis Stevenson who showed that Christian minister what true Christianity would have led him to say instead of what he did say. Father Damien's ministry was self-sacrificing, noble, and divine, even though,--granting for the moment the truth of the minister's slander,--his service was touched of the earth, earthy. Yet the beneficence and blessedness of it was so supremely above the smug, self-satisfied, standing-aloofness of the "immaculate" ministerial critic that Stevenson's colossal rebuke to the latter found perfect echo in the heart of every decent man and woman throughout the world. Joaquin Miller expresses the same thought in his beautiful and strong poem on Father Damien when he says:
If we can do so much better than those we criticise, why, in the name of heaven and suffering humanity, do we not go ahead and do it? Let us do our best regardless of our own infirmities and weakness and the consequent criticisms of others.
So I want to radiate to the needy and unworthy my readiness, nay, my anxiety to serve them whenever and wherever I possibly can. And though my service be not unmixed gold, though there be in it some of the dross of imperfection, I would not withhold my hand on that account, but I would serve the more readily and gladly in the hope and assurance that by suffering with the needy and unworthy in their need and unworthiness the fire of their pain and sorrow may help refine away the dross in me and leave only that of pure gold.