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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: the lips of Protestants who had opposed the father in his life.
Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up the image of a man,
with all his weakness, essentially heroic, and alive with rugged
honesty, generosity, and mirth.
Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides
of Damien's character, collected from the lips of those who had
laboured with and (in your own phrase) "knew the man"; - though I
question whether Damien would have said that he knew you. Take it,
and observe with wonder how well you were served by your gossips,
how ill by your intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of
fact we are at one, and how widely our appreciations vary. There
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