July 23rd, 1874.

Another year has passed over us, my dear friends. There have been many changes among us. We have each of us tasted somewhat more of the discipline of life. To some of us it may have been very bitter; to others, let us hope, not so. By all, let us trust, it has been put to heroic uses.

“Heroic?” I think I hear you say; “can there be much of ‘heroic’ in washing porringers and making beds?”

I once heard a man (he is dead now) giving a lesson to some poor orphan girls in an Orphan Asylum. Few things, I think, ever struck me so much, or them. It was on the “heroic virtues.” It went into the smallest particulars of thrift, of duty, of love and kindness; and he ended by asking them how they thought such small people as themselves could manage to practise those great virtues. A child of seven put up its little nib and chirped out: “Please, my lord, we might pick up pins when we don’t like to.” That showed she understood his lesson.

His lesson was not exactly fitted to us, but we may all fit it to ourselves.

This night, if we are inclined to make a noise on the stairs, or to linger in each other’s rooms, shall we go quietly to bed, alone with God? Some of you yourselves have told me that you could get better day sleep in the Night Nurses’ Dormitory than in your own “Home.” Is there such loud laughing and boisterous talking in the daytime, going upstairs to your rooms, that it disturbs any one who is ill, or prevents those who have been on night duty from getting any sleep?

Is that doing what you would be done by—loving your neighbour as yourselves, as our Master told us?

Do you think it is we who invent the duty “Quiet and orderly,” or is it He?

If our uniform dress is not what we like, shall we think of our Lord, whose very garments were divided by the soldiers? (But I always think how much more becoming is our uniform than any other dress I see.)

If there is anything at table that we don’t like, shall we take it thankfully, remembering Who had to ask a poor woman for a drink of water?

Shall we take the utmost pains to be perfectly regular and punctual to all our hours—going into the wards, coming out of the wards, at meals, etc.? And if we are unavoidably prevented, making an apology to the Home Sister, remembering what has been written about those who are in authority over us? Or do we think a few minutes of no consequence in coming from or going to the wards?

Do we carefully observe our Rules?

If we are what is printed at the top of our Duties, viz.:

we scarcely need any other lesson but what explains these to us.

Trustworthy: that is, faithful.

Trustworthy when we have no one by to urge or to order us. “Her lips were never opened but to speak the truth.” Can that be said of us?

Trustworthy, in keeping our soul in our hands, never excited, but always ready to lift it up to God; unstained by the smallest flirtation, innocent of the smallest offence, even in thought.

Trustworthy, in doing our work as faithfully as if our superiors were always near us.

Trustworthy, in never prying into one another’s concerns, but ever acting behind another’s back as one would to her face.

Trustworthy, in avoiding every word that could injure, in the smallest degree, our patients, or our companions, who are our neighbours, remembering how St. Peter says that God made us all “stewards of grace one to another.”

How can we be “stewards of grace” to one another? By giving the “grace” of our good example to all around us. And how can we become “untrustworthy stewards” to one another? By showing ourselves lax in our habits, irregular in our ways, not doing as we should do if our superiors were by. “Cripple leads the way.” Shall the better follow the worse?

It has happened to me to hear some of you say—perhaps it has happened to us all—“Indeed, I only did what I saw done.”

How glorious it would be if “only doing what we saw done” always led us right!

A master of a great public school once said that he could trust his whole school, because he could trust every single boy in it. Oh, could God but say that He can trust this Home and Hospital because He can trust every woman in it! Let us try this—every woman to work as though success depended on herself. Do you know that, in this great Indian Famine, every Englishman has worked as if success depended on himself? And in saving a population as large as that of England from death by starvation, do you not think that we have achieved the greatest victory we ever won in India? Suppose we work thus for this Home and Hospital.

Oh, my dear friends, how terrible it will be to any one of us, some day, to hear another say, that she only did what she saw us do, if that was on the “road that leadeth to destruction”!

Or taking it another way, how delightful—how delightful to have set another on her journey to heaven by our good example; how terrible to have delayed another on her journey to heaven by our bad example!

There is an old story—nearly six hundred years old—when a ploughboy said to a truly great man, whose name is known in history, that he “advised” him “always to live in such a way that those who had a good opinion of him might never be disappointed.”

The great man thanked him for his advice, and—kept it.

If our School has a good name, do we live so that people “may never be disappointed” in its Nurses?

Obedient: not wilful: not having such a sturdy will of our own. Common sense tells us that no training can do us any good, if we are always seeking our own way. I know that some have really sought in dedication to God to give up their own wills to His. For if you enter this Training School, is that not in effect a promise to Him to give up your own way for that way which you are taught?

Let us not question so much. You must know that things have been thought over and arranged for your benefit. You are not bound to think us always right: perhaps you can’t. But are you more likely to be right? And, at all events, you know you are right, if you choose to enter our ways, to submit yours to them.

In a foreign Training School, I once heard a most excellent pastor, who was visiting there, say to a nurse: “Are you discouraged?—say rather, you are disobedient: they always mean the same thing.” And I thought how right he was. And, what is more, the Nurse thought so too; and she was not “discouraged” ever after, because she gave up being “disobedient.”

“Every one for herself” ought to have no footing here: and these strong wills of ours God will teach. If we do not let Him teach us here, He will teach us by some sterner discipline hereafter—teach our wills to bend first to the will of God, and then to the reasonable and lawful wills of those among whom our lot is cast.

I often say for myself, and I have no doubt you do, that line of the hymn:

Let Him reduce us to His discipline before it is too late. If we “kick against the pricks,” we can only pray that He will give us more “pricks,” till we cease to “kick.” And it is a proof of His fatherly love, and that He has not given us up, if He does.

For myself, I can say that I have never known what it was, since I can remember anything, not to have “prickly” discipline, more than any one knew of; and I hope I have not “kicked.”

To return to Trustworthiness.

Most of you, on leaving the Home, go first on night duty. Now there is nothing like night duty for trying our trustworthiness. A year hence you will tell me whether you have felt any temptation not to be quite honest in reporting cases the next morning to your Sister or Nurse: that is, to say you have observed when you have not observed; to slur over things in your report, which, for aught you know, may be of consequence to the patient: to slur over things in your work because there is no one watching you: no one but God.

It has indeed been known that the Night Nurse had stayed in the kitchen to talk; but we may trust such things will not happen again.

And, for all, let us all say this word for ourselves: everything gets toppled over if we don’t make it a matter of conscience, a matter of reckoning between ourselves and our God. That is the only safeguard of real trustworthiness. If we treat it as a mere matter of business, of success in our career in life, never shall we give anything but eye-service, never shall we be really trustworthy.

Orderly: Let us never waste anything, even pins or paper, as some do, by beginning letters or resolutions, or “cases,” which they never take the trouble to finish.

Cheerful and Patient: Let us never wish for more than is necessary, and be cheerful when what we should like is sometimes denied us, as it may be some day; or when people are unkind, or we are disregarded by those we love: remembering Him whose attendants at His death were mocking soldiers.

I assure you, my friends, that if we can practise those “duties” faithfully, we are practising the “heroic virtues.”

Patient, cheerful, and kindly: Now, is it being patient, cheerful, and kindly to be so only with those who are so to us? For, as St. Peter tells us, even ungodly people do that. But if we can do good to some one who has done us ill, oh, what a privilege that is! And even God will thank us for it, the Apostle says. Let us be kindest to the impatient and unkindly.

Now let me tell you of two Nurses whom we knew.

One was a lady, with just enough to live upon, who took an old widow to nurse into her house: recommended to her by her minister. One day she met him and reproached him. Why? Because the old widow was “too good”; “anybody could nurse her.” Presently a grumbling old woman, never contented with anything anybody did, who thought she was never treated well enough, and that she never had “her due,” was found. And this old woman the lady took into her house and nursed till she died; because, she said, nobody else liked to do anything for her, and she did. That was something like kindness, for there is no great kindness in doing good to any one who is grateful and thanks us for it.

But my other story is something much better still.

A poor Nurse, who had been left a widow, with nothing to live upon but her own earnings, inquired for some tedious children to take care of. As you may suppose, there was no difficulty in finding this article. And from that day, for twenty years, she never had less than two, three, or four orphans with her, and sometimes five, whom she brought up as her own, training them for service. She taught them domestic work, for she herself went out to service at nine years old. She never had any difficulty in finding places for them, and for twenty years she had thus a succession of children. But she taught them something better.

She taught them that they had “nothing but their character to depend upon.” “I tell them,” she said, “it was all I had myself; God helps girls that watch over themselves. If a girl isn’t made to feel this early, it’s hard afterwards to make her feel it.”

These girls, so brought up, turned out much better than those brought up in most large Union schools, for asylums are not like homes. Of the children whom Nurse took in, one was a girl of such bad habits and such a mischief-maker that no one else could manage her. But Nurse did. She soon found she could not refuse boys. One was a boy of fourteen, just out of prison for bad ways, whom she took and reclaimed, and who became as good a boy as can be. These are only two specimens.

They called her “Mother.” And God, she used to say, gave them to her as her own. You will ask how she supported them. The larger number of them she supported by taking in washing, by charing one day a week, and bye and bye, by taking in journeymen as lodgers. Now and then a lady would pay for an orphan. Once she took in a sailor’s five motherless children for 5s. a week from the father: but she has taken in apprentices as lodgers, whose own fathers could not afford to keep them for their wages.

All this time she washed for a poor sick Irishwoman, who never gave her any thanks but that “the clothes were not well washed, nor was anything done as it ought to be done.” Yet she took in this woman’s child of two years old as her own, till the father came back, when he gave up drink and claimed it.

Every Friday she gave her earnings to some poor women, who bought goods with the money, which they sold again in the market on Saturday, and returned her money to her on Saturday night. She said she never lost a penny by this: and it kept several old women going.

She must have been a capital manager, you will say. Well, till she took in lodgers, she lived in a cellar which she painted with her own hands, and kept as clean as a new pin. Afterwards she let her cellar for 2s. a week, though she might have got 2s. 6d. or 3s. a week for it, because, she said, “the poor should not be hard on one another.” Milk she never tasted; meat seldom, and then she always stewed, never roasted it. She lived on potatoes, and potato pie was the luxury of herself and children.

On Sundays she filled her pot of four gallons and made broth: sometimes for six or eight poor old women besides her own family, as she called her orphans. These must be satisfied with what she provided, little or much. She never let them touch what was sent her for her patients. Sometimes good things were sent her, which she always gave to sick neighbours; yet she has been accused of keeping for herself nice things sent to her care for others. She never owed a penny, for all her charity.

If this Nurse has not practised the “heroic virtues,” who has?

I mentioned this Nurse merely as an instance of one who literally fulfilled the precept to “do good” to them that “despitefully use you”: to be “patient, cheerful, and kindly.” There is no time to tell you how she was left a widow with two infants and a blind and insane mother, whom she kept till doctors compelled her to put her mother into a lunatic asylum: how one of her sons was a sickly cripple, whom she nursed till he died, working by day and sitting up with him at night for years: how the other boy was insane, and ran away: how, to ease her broken mother’s heart, she returned to sick-nursing, chiefly among the poor, nursed through two choleras, till her health broke down, and, by way of taking care of herself, then took up the “tedious” orphan system, which she never ceased. She felt, she said, as if she were doing something then for her “own dear boy.” As soon as she lived in a poor house of four rooms and an attic, she has had as many as ten carpenters’ men of a night, who had nowhere but the public-house to go to. She gave them a good fire, borrowed a newspaper for them, and made one read aloud. They brought her sixpence a week, and she laid it all out in supper for them, and cooked it. She gave the only good pair of shoes she had to one of these, because “he must go to work decent!”

She was a famous sick cook, often carrying home fish-bones to stew them for the sick, who seldom thanked her; and the remains of damsons and currants, to boil over again as a drink for fever patients: who sometimes accused her of keeping back things sent for them.

“How much more the Lord has borne from me,” she used to say.

And of children she used to say: “We never can train up a child in the way it should go till we take it in our arms, as Jesus did, and feel: ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven’; and that there is a ‘heavenly principle’ (a ‘little angel,’ I think she said) in each child to be trained up in it.”

She said she had learnt this from the master in a factory where she had once nursed.

(How little he knew that he had been one means of forming this heroic Nurse.)

II

And now I have a word for the Ladies, and a word for the Nurse-Probationers. Which shall come first?

Do the ladies follow up their intellectual privileges? Or, are they lazy in their hours of study? Do they cultivate their powers of expression in answering Mr. Croft’s examinations?

Ought they not to look upon themselves as future leaders—as those who will have to train others? And to bear this in mind during the whole of their year’s training, so as to qualify themselves for being so? It is not just getting through the year anyhow, without being blamed. For the year leaves a stamp on everybody—this for the Nurses as well as the Ladies—and once gone can never be regained.

To the Special Probationers may I say one more word?

Do we look enough into the importance of giving ourselves thoroughly to study in the hours of study, of keeping careful Notes of Lectures, of keeping notes of all type cases, and of cases interesting from not being type cases, so as to improve our powers of observation—all essential if we are in future to have charge? Do we keep in view the importance of helping ourselves to understand these cases by reading at the time books where we can find them described, and by listening to the remarks made by Physicians and Surgeons in going round with their Students? (Take a sly note afterwards, when nobody sees, in order to have a correct remembrance.)

So shall we do everything in our power to become proficient, not only in knowing the symptoms and what is to be done, but in knowing the “Reason Why” of such symptoms, and why such and such a thing is done; and so on, till we can some day TRAIN OTHERS to know the “reason why.”

Many say: “We have no time; the Ward work gives us no time.”

But it is so easy to degenerate into a mere drudgery about the Wards, when we have goodwill to do it, and are fonder of practical work than of giving ourselves the trouble of learning the “reason why.” Take care, or the Nurses, some of them, will catch you up.

Take ten minutes a day in the Ward to jot down things, and write them out afterwards: come punctually from your Ward to have time for doing so. It is far better to take these ten minutes to write your cases or to jot down your recollections in the Ward than to give the same ten minutes to bustling about. I am sure the Sisters would help you to get this time if you asked them: and also to leave the Ward punctually.

And do you not think this a religious duty?

Such observations are a religious meditation: for is it not the best part of religion to imitate the benevolence of God to man? And how can you do this—in this your calling especially—if you do not thoroughly understand your calling? And is not every study to do this a religious contemplation?

Without it, May you not potter and cobble about the patients without ever once learning the reason of what you do, so as to be able to train others?

(I do not say anything about the “cards,” for I take it for granted that you can read them easily.)

Our dear Matron, who is always thinking of arranging for us, is going to have a case-paper with printed headings given to you, and to keep this correctly ought to be a mere every-day necessity, and a very easy one, for you.

2. And for the Nurses:

They are placed, perhaps here only, on a footing of equality with educated gentlewomen. Do they show their appreciation of this by thinking, “We are as good as they”? Or, by obedience and respect, and trying to profit by the superior education of the gentlewomen?

Both we have known; we have known Nurse-Probationers who took the Ladies “under their protection” in saving them the harder work, and the Ladies have given them the full return back in helping them in their education.

And we have known—very much the reverse.

Also, do the Nurse-Probationers take advantage of their opportunities, in the excellent classes given them by the Home Sister, in keeping diaries and some cases?

Very few of the Nurse-Probationers have taken notes of Mr. Croft’s Lectures at all; it is not fair to Mr. Croft to give him people who do not benefit by his instruction.

3. And I have another word to say:

Are there parties in our Home?

Could we but be not so tenacious of our own interests, but look at the thing in a larger way!

Is there a great deal of canvassing and misinterpreting Sisters and Matron and other authorities? every little saying and doing of theirs? talking among one another about the superiors (and then finding we were all wrong when we came to know them better)?

We must all of us know, without being told, that we cannot be trained at all, if in training this will of our own is not kept under.

Do not question so much. Does not a spirit of criticism go with ignorance? Are some of you in all the “opposition of irresponsibility”? Some day, when you are yourselves responsible, you will know what I mean.

Now could not the Ladies help the Nurse-Probationers in this: (1) in never themselves criticising; and (2) in saying a kindly word to check it when it is done?

Let me tell you a true story about this.

In a large college, questions—about things which the students could but imperfectly understand in the conduct of the college—had become too warm. The superintendent went into the hall one morning, and after complimenting the young men on their studies, he said: “This morning I heard two of the porters, while at their work, take up a Greek book lying on my table; one tried to read it, and the other declared it ought to be held upside down to be read. Neither could agree which was upside down, but both thought themselves quite capable of arguing about Greek, though neither could read it. They were just coming to fisticuffs, when I sent the two on different errands.”

Not a word was added: the students laughed and retired, but they understood the moral well enough, and from that day there were few questions or disputes about the plans and superiors of the college, or about their own obedience to rules and discipline.

Do let us think of the two porters squabbling whether the Greek book was to be read upside down, when we feel inclined to be questioning about “things too high for us.”

We are constantly making mistakes in our judgment of our little world. We fancy that we have been harshly treated or misunderstood. Or we cannot bear our fellow-Probationers to laugh at us.

Believe me, there will come a time when all such troubles will simply seem ridiculous to us, and we shall be unable to imagine how we could ever have been the victims of them. (One of your number told me this herself. She has left St. Thomas’ for another post.) Let us not brood or sentimentalise over them. They should be met in a common-sense way. How much of our time has been spent in grieving over these trifles, how little in the real sorrow for sin, the real struggle for improvement.

4. As for obedience to rules and our superiors: “True obedience,” said one of the most efficient people who ever lived, “obeys not only the command, but also the intention” of those who have a right to command us. Of course, this is a truism: the thing is, how to do it. As it is a struggle, it requires a brave and intrepid spirit, which helps us to rise above trifles and look to God, and His leadings for us. Oh, when death comes, how sorry we shall be to have watched others so much and ourselves so little; to have dug so much in the field of others’ consciences and left our own fallow! What should we say of a “Leopold” Nurse who should try to nurse in “Edward” Ward, and neglect her own “Leopold”? Well, that is what we do. Or who should wash her patients’ hands and not her own?

It is of ourselves and not of others that we must give an account. Let us look to our own consciences as we do to our own hands, to see if they are dirty.

We take care of our dress, but do we take care of our words?

It is a very good rule to say and do nothing but what we can offer to God. Now we cannot offer Him backbiting, petty scandal, misrepresentation, flirtation, injustice, bad temper, bad thoughts, jealousy, murmuring, complaining. Do we ever think that we bear the responsibility of all the harm we do in this way?

Look at that busybody who fidgets, gossips, makes a bustle, always wanting to domineer, always thinking of herself, as if she wanted to tell the sun to get out of her way and let her light the world in its place, as the proverb says.

And when we might do all our actions and say all our words as unto God!

So many imperfections; so many thoughts of self-love; so many selfish satisfactions that we mix with our best actions! And when we might offer them all to God. What a pity!

5. One word more for the Ladies, or those who will have to train and look after others.

What must she be who is to be a Ward or “Home” Sister?

We see her in her nobleness and simplicity: being, not seeming: without name or reward in this world: “clothed” in her “righteousness” merely, as the Psalms would say, not in her dignity: often having no gifts of money, speech, or strength: but never preferring seeming to being.

And if she rises still higher, she will find herself, in some measure, like the Great Example in Isaiah 1iii., bearing the sins and sorrows of others as if they were her own: her counsels often “despised and rejected,” yet “opening not her mouth” to be angry: “led as a lamb to the slaughter.”

She who rules best is she who loves best: and shows her love not by foolish indulgence to those of whom she is in charge, but by taking a real interest in them for their own sakes, and in their highest interests.

Her firmness must never degenerate into nervous irritability. And for this end let me advise you when you become Sisters, always to take your exercise time out of doors, your monthly day out, and your annual holiday.

Be a judge of the work of others of whom you are in charge, not a detective: your mere detective “is wonderful at suspicion and discovery,” but is often at fault, foolishly imagining that every one is bad.

The Head-Nurse must have been tested in the refiner’s fire, as the prophets would say: have been tried by many tests: and have come out of them stainless, in full command of herself and her principles: never losing her temper.

She never nurses well till she ceases to command for the sake of commanding, or for her own sake at all: till she nurses only for the sakes of those who are nursed. This is the highest exercise of self-denial; but without it the ruin of the nursing, of the charge, is sure to come.

Have we ever known such a Nurse?

She must be just, not unjust.

Now justice is the perfect order by which every woman does her own business, and injustice is where every woman is doing another’s business. This is the most obvious of all things: and for that very reason has never been found out. Injustice is the habit of being a busybody and doing another woman’s business, which tries to rule and ought to serve: this is the unjust Nurse.

Prudence is doing your nursing most perfectly: aiming at the perfect in everything: this is the “seeking God and His righteousness” of the Scriptures.

And must not each of us be a Saviour, rather than a ruler: each in our poor measure? Did the Son of God try to rule? Oh, my friends, do not scold at women: they will be of another mind if they are “gently entreated” and learn to know you. Who can hate a woman who loves them? Or be jealous of one who has no jealousy? Who can squabble with one who never squabbles? It is example which converts your patients, your ward-maids, your fellow-Nurses or charges: it is example which converts the world.

And is not the Head-Nurse or Sister there, not that she may do as she likes, but that she should serve all for the common good of all? The one worst maxim of all for a future Matron, Sister, or Nurse is “to do as I like”: that is disorder, not rule. It is giving power to evil.

Those who rule must not be those who are desirous to rule.

She who is best fitted is often the least inclined to rule: but if the necessity is laid upon her, she takes it up as a message from God. And she must no longer live in her own thoughts, making a heaven or hell of her own. For if she does not make a heaven for others, her charge will soon become something else.

She must never become excited: and therefore I do impress upon you regularity and punctuality, and never to get hurried. Those often get most excited who are least in earnest. She who is fierce with her Nurses, her patients, or her ward-maid, is not truly above them: she is below them: and, although a harsh ward-mistress to her patients or Nurses, has no real superiority over them.

There is no impudence like that of ignorance. Each night let us come to a knowledge of ourselves before going to rest: as the Psalm says: “Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.” Is it possible that we who live among the sick and dying can be satisfied not to make friends with God each night?

The future Sister should be neither mistress nor servant, but the friend of every woman under her. If she is mistress of others when she is not mistress of herself, her jealous, faithless temper grows worse with command (oh, let not this be the case with any of us!)—wanting everything of everybody, yet not knowing how to get it of anybody. Always in fear, confusion, suspicion, and distraction, she becomes more and more faithless, envious, unrighteous, the cause of wretchedness to herself and others. She who has no control over herself, who cannot master her own temper, how can she be placed over others, to control them through the better principle? But she who is the most royal mistress of herself is the only woman fit to be in charge.

For this is the whole intention of training, education, supervision, superintendence: to give self-control, to train or nurse up in us a higher principle; and when this is attained, you may go your ways safely into the world.

But she who nurses, and does not nurse up in herself the “infant Christ,” who should be born again in us every day, is like an empty syringe—it pumps in only wind.

The future Sister must be not of the governessing but of the Saviour turn of mind.

Let her reason with the unjust woman who is not intentionally in error. She must know how to give good counsel, which will advise what is best under the circumstances; not making a lament, but finding a cure; regarding that only as “bettering” their situation which makes them better. She must know and teach “how to refuse the evil and choose the good,” as Isaiah says.

She must have an iron sense of truth and right for herself and others, and a golden sense of love and charity for them.

When a future Sister unites the power of command with the power of thought and love, when she can raise herself and others above the commonplaces of a common self without disregarding any of our common feelings, when she can plan and effect any reforms wanted step by step, without trying to precipitate them into a single year or month, neither hasting nor delaying: that is indeed a “Sister.”

The future Sister or Head must not see only a little corner of things, her own petty likes and dislikes; she must “lift up her eyes to the hills,” as David says. She must know that there is a greater and more real world than her own littlenesses and meannesses. And she must be not only the friend of her Nurses, but also, in her measure, the angel whose mission is to reconcile her Nurses to themselves, to each other, and to God.

III

Now let us not each of us think how this fits on to her neighbour, but how it fits on to oneself.

Shall I tell you what one of you said to me after I last addressed you?—“Do you think we are missionaries?”

I answer, that you cannot help being missionaries, if you would. There are missionaries for evil as well as for good. Can you help choosing? Must you not decide whether you will be missionaries for good, or whether for evil, among your patients and among yourselves?

And, first, among your patients:

Hospital Nurses have charge of their patients in a way that no other woman has charge; in the first place, no other woman is in charge really of grown-up men. Oh, how careful she ought to be, especially the Night Nurse, to show them what a true woman can be! The acts of a nurse are keenly scrutinised by both old and young patients. If she is not perfectly pure and upright, depend upon it, they know.

Also, a Hospital Nurse is in charge of people in their sick and feeble, anxious and dying hours, when they are singularly alive to impressions. She leaves her stamp upon them, whether she will or no. And this applies almost more to the Night Nurse than to the Day Nurse.

Lastly, if she have children-patients, she is absolutely in charge of these, who come, perhaps for the first and the last time of their lives, under influence.

So many pass by a child without notice. A whole life of happiness or wretchedness may turn upon an act of kindness to it—a good example set it. A poor woman once said of a child of hers under just these circumstances: “The Sister set its face heavenwards: and it never looked back.” Do we ever set their faces the other way? The child she spoke of when it was dying actually gave its halfpence, which it had saved for something for itself, for another dying child “who had nobody.” I call that practising the “heroic virtues,” if ever there were such. And that was done under just such an influence as we have been speaking of.

On the other hand, do you know anything in its way more heinous than a Nurse, who to the sick and tiresome child might be like an angel “to set its face heavenward” by her sympathy with it, and who, by her own bad habits or bad temper, by her unfairness, by her unkindness or injustice, by her coarseness or want of uprightness, sets it the other way?

A very good man once said that in each little Hospital patient, he saw not only a soul to be saved, but many other souls that might possibly be committed to this one: for the poor can do so much among one another: do what no others going among them can do. Every child is of the stuff out of which Home Missionaries may be made, such as God chooses from the ranks that have furnished his best recruits.

The Apostles were fishermen and workmen.

David Livingstone was a cotton-mill piecer. In each little pauper waif he saw one destined to carry a godly example (or the reverse) where none but they could carry it—into godless and immoral homes.

We will not repeat here, because we are so fully persuaded of it, that a woman, especially a Nurse, must be a missionary, not as a minister or chaplain is, but by the influence of her own character, silent but not unfelt.

It was this, far more than any words, that gave his matchless influence to David Livingstone, whose body, brought upwards of 1500 miles through pathless deserts by his own negro servants—such a heroic feat as Christians never knew before—was buried this spring in Westminster Abbey. Some of us knew him: one of our Probationers was with him and his wife, who died in 1862, and Bishop Mackenzie, at their Mission Station in Africa. He was such a traveller and missionary as we shall never see again perhaps. But what he was in influence each of us may be, if we please, in our little sphere.

A Nurse is like a traveller, from the quantity of people who pass before her in the ever-changing wards. And she is like a traveller also in this, that, as Livingstone used to say, either the vices or the virtues of civilisation follow the footsteps of the traveller, and he cannot help it. So they do those of the Nurse. And missioning will be, whether she will or no, the background of her nursing, as it is the background of travelling. The traveller may call himself a missionary or not, as he likes. He is one, for good or for evil. So is the Nurse.

Livingstone used to say that we fancy a missionary a man with a Bible in his hand and another in his pack. He then went on to say what a real missionary must be in himself to have influence. And he added: “If I had once been suspected of a single act of want of purity or uprightness the negroes would never have trusted me again. No, not even the least pure or the least upright of the negroes. And any influence of mine would have been gone for ever.” What his influence was, even after his death, you know.

Then you must be missionaries, whether you will or no, among one another.

We need only think of the friendships that are made here. Will you be a missionary of good or of evil to your friend? Will you be a missionary of indifference, selfishness, lightness of conduct, self-indulgence? Or a missionary—to her and to your patients—of religious and noble devotion to duty, carried out to the smallest thing?

Will you be a “hero” in your daily work, like the dying child giving its hard-saved halfpence to the yet poorer child?

Livingstone always remembered that a poor old Scotchman on his death-bed had said to him: “Now, lad, make religion the every-day business of your life, not a thing of fits and starts; for if you do not, temptation and other things will get the better of you.”

Such a Nurse—one who makes religion the “every-day business of her life,” is a “Missionary,” even if she never speak a word. One who does not is a missionary for evil and not for good, though she may say many words, have many good texts at the end of her tongue, or, as Livingstone would say, a Bible in her hand and a Bible at her back.

Believe me, who have seen a good deal of the world, we may give you an institution to learn in, but it is You must furnish the “heroic” feeling of doing your duty, doing your best, without which no institution is safe, without which Training Schools are meat without salt. You must be our salt, without which civilisation is but corruption, and all churches only dead establishments.

Shall I tell you what one of the most famous clergymen that ever lived said? That, in order to manage people, and especially children, well, it was necessary to speak more of them to God than of God to them. If a famous preacher said that, how much more must a woman?

Another learned clergyman, who was also the best translator of the Bible (in a foreign language), said: “Prayer, rather than speech must be relied upon for the reform of any little irregularities: for only through prayer could the proper moment for speech become known.” If a great leader of mankind said that, how much more should a Nurse?

I must end: and what I say now I had better have said: and nothing else.

What are we without God? Nothing.

“Father, glorify Thy name!” How is His name glorified? We are His glory, when we follow His ways. Then we are something.

What is the Christian religion? To be like Christ.

And what is it to be like Christ? To be High Church, Low Church, Dissenter, or orthodox? Oh, no. It is: to live for God and have God for our object.