London, May 26, 1875.

My dear Friends,—This year my letter to you must needs be short, for I am not able to write much. But good words are always short. The best words that ever were spoken—Christ’s words—were the shortest. Would that ours were always the echo of His!

First, then:

What is our one thing needful? To have high principles at the bottom of all. Without this, without having laid our foundation, there is small use in building up our details. That is as if you were to try to nurse without eyes or hands. We know who said, If your foundation is laid in shifting sand, you may build your house, but it will tumble down. But if you build it on solid ground, this is what is called being rooted and grounded in Christ.

In the great persecutions in France two hundred years ago (not only of the Protestants, who came over here and settled in Spitalfields, but of all who held the higher and more spiritual religion) a noble woman, who has left her impress on the Christian Church, and who herself endured two hard imprisonments for conscience’ sake, would receive no Probationer into her Institution, which was, like ours, for works of Nursing and for the poor, till the Probationer had well considered whether she were really rooted and grounded in God himself, and not in the mere habit of obeying rule and doing her work; whether she could do without the supports of the example and fellowship of a large and friendly community, the sympathy and praise of fellow-workers—all good things in themselves, but which will not carry us through a life like Christ’s. And I doubt whether any woman whom God is forming for Himself is not at some time or other of her life tried and tested in this lonely path.

A French Princess, who did well consider, and who was received into the said Institution on these conditions, has left us in writing her experience. And well she showed where she was “rooted and grounded” through ten after-years of prison and persecution.

We have not to endure these things. Our lot is cast in gentler times.

But I will tell you an old woman’s experience—that I can never remember a time, and that I do not know a work, which so requires to be rooted and grounded in God as ours.

You remember the question in the hymn, “Am I His, or am I not?” If I am, this is what is called our “hidden life with Christ in God.” We all have a “hidden life” in ourselves, besides our outward working life. If our hidden life is filled with chatter and fancies, our outward working life will be the fruits of it.

“By their fruits ye shall know them,” Christ says. Christ knows the good Nurse. It is not the good talker whom Christ knows as the good Nurse.

If our hidden life is “with Christ in God,” by its fruits, too, it will be known.

What is it to live “with Christ in God”? It is to live in Christ’s spirit: forgiving any injuries, real or fancied, from our fellow-workers, from those above us as well as from those below (alas! how small our injuries are that we should talk of forgiving!) thirsting after righteousness, righteousness, i.e. doing completely one’s duty towards all with whom we have to do, towards God above as well as towards our fellow-nurses, our patients, our matron, home sister, and instructors; fain to be holy as God is holy, perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect in our hospital and training school; caring for nothing more than for God’s will in this His training; careful for our sick and fellow-Nurses more than for ourselves; active, like Christ, in our work; like Christ, meek and lowly in heart in our Wards and “Home”; peacemakers among our companions, which includes the never repeating anything which may do mischief; placing our spirits in the Father’s charge. (“I am the Almighty’s charge,” says the hymn.) This is to live a life with Christ in God.

You may have heard of Mr. Wilberforce. He it was who, after a long life of unremitting activity, varied only with disappointment, carried the Abolition of the Slave Trade, one of England’s greatest titles to the gratitude of nations. Slavery, as Livingstone said, is the open sore of the world. (Mr. Clarkson and my grandfather were two of his fellow-workers.) Some one asked how Mr. Wilberforce did this, and a man I knew answered, “Because his life was hid with Christ in God.”

Never was there a truer word spoken. And if we, when the time comes for us to be in charge of Wards, are enabled to “abolish” anything wrong in them, it can only be in the same way, by our life being hid with Christ in God. And no man or woman will do great things for God, or even small, whose “hidden life” is employed in self-complacency, or in thinking over petty slights, or of what other people are thinking of her.

We have three judges—our God, our neighbour, and ourselves. Our own judgment of ourselves is, perhaps, generally too favourable: our neighbour’s judgment of us too unfavourable, except in the case of close friends, who may sometimes spoil each other. Shall we always remember to seek God’s judgment of us, knowing this, that it will some day find us, whether we seek it or not? He knows who is His nurse, and who is not.

This is laying the “foundation”; this is the “hidden life with Christ in God” for us Nurses. “Keeping up to the mark,” as St. Paul says; and nothing else will keep us up to the mark in Nursing.

“Neglect nothing; the most trivial action may be performed to ourselves, or performed to God.” What a pity that so many actions should be wasted by us Nurses in our Wards and in our “Home,” when we might always be doing common things uncommonly well!

Small things are of consequence—small things are of no consequence; we say this often to ourselves and to each other.

And both these sayings are true.

Every brick is of consequence, every dab of mortar, that it may be as good as possible in building up your house. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link: therefore every link is of consequence. And there can be no “small” thing in Nursing. How often we have seen a Nurse’s life wrecked, in its usefulness, by some apparently small fault! Perhaps this is to say that there can be no small things in the nursing service of God.

But in the service of ourselves, oh! how small the things are! Of no consequence indeed. How small they will appear to us all some day!

For what does it profit a Nurse if she gain the whole world to praise her, and lose her own soul in conceit? What does it profit if the judgment of the whole world is for us Nurses, and God’s is against us?

It is a real danger, in works like these, when all men praise us. We must then see if we are “rooted and grounded in Christ Himself,” to nurse as He would have us nurse, as He was in God, to do His Saviour-work. Am I His, or am I not?

It is a real danger, too, if in works like these we do not uphold the credit of our School. That is not bearing fruit. Can we hope, may we hope that, at least, some day, Christ may say even to our Training School, as He did once to His first followers, “Ye are the salt of the earth”? But oh! if we may hope this, let us never forget for one moment the terrible conclusion of that verse.

If we can, in the faintest sense, be called “the salt “of God’s nursing world, let us watch, watch, watch, that we may never lose our “savour.” One woman, as we well know, may be honoured by God to be “the salt” to purify a whole Ward. One woman may have lost her “savour,” and a Ward be left without its “salt,” and untold harm done.

We ought to be very much obliged to our kind Medical Instructor for the pains he has taken with us, and to show this by our careful attention. Without this there can be no improvement.

There is a time for all things—a time to be trained, and a time to use our training. And if we have thrown away the year we have here, we can hardly recover it. Besides, what a shame it is to come here, as Probationers, at considerable cost (to others, most of us), and then not to make our improvement the chief business of our lives, so that at the end of our year we go away not much better but rather worse than we came! What account can we give of such a waste of time and opportunities, of the best gifts of God, to ourselves and to Him? “For God requireth that which is past.” If, when I was young, there had been such opportunities of training for Hospital work as you have, how eagerly I should have made the most of them!

Therefore, “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might”: be earnest in work, be earnest also even in such things as taking exercise and proper holiday. I say this particularly to future Matrons and Sisters, for there should be something of seriousness in keeping our bodies[7] too up to the mark.

Life is short, as preachers often tell us: that is, each stage of it is apt to come to an end before the work which belongs to it is finished. Let us

Let us be in earnest in work: above all, because we believe this life to be the beginning of another, into which we carry with us what we have been and done here; because we are working together with God (remember the Parting Command!) and He is upholding us in our work (remember the Parting Promise!); because, when the hour of death approaches, we should wish to think (like Christ) that we have completed life, that we have finished the work which was given us to do, that we have not lost one of those, Patients or Nurses, who were entrusted to us.

What was the Parting Command? What was the Parting Promise?

We Nurses have just kept Ascension Day and Whit-Sunday. Shall we Nurses not remember the Parting Command on Ascension Day—to preach the Gospel to every creature? And the Parting Promise: “And lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

That Command and that Promise were given, not to the Apostles or Disciples only, but to each and every one of us Nurses: to each to herself in her own Ward or Home.

Without the Promise the Command could not be obeyed. Without we obey the Command the Promise will not be fulfilled.

Christ tells us what He means by the Command. He tells us, over and over again: it is by ourselves, by what we are in ourselves, that we are “to preach the Gospel.” Not what we say, but what we do, is the Preacher. Not saying “Lord, Lord,”—for how many ungodly things are done and said in the name of God—but “keeping his commandments,” this it is which “preaches” Him; it is the bearing much “fruit,” not the saying many words. God’s Spirit leads us rather to be silent than to speak, to do good works rather than to say fine things or to write them.

Over and over again, and especially in His first and last discourses, He insists upon this. He takes the sweet little child and places it in our midst: it was as if He had said, “Ah! that is the best preacher of you all.” And those who have followed Him best have felt this most.

The most successful preacher the world has probably seen since St. Paul’s time said, some 300 years ago, it was by showing an example, not by delivering a discourse, that the Apostles’ work was really done, that the Gospel was really preached. And well did he show his own belief in this truth. For when all was ready for his mission to convert China to Christianity, and the plague broke out where he was, he stayed and nursed the plague.

We can, every one of us here present, though our teaching may not be much, by our lives “preach a continual sermon, that all who see may understand.” (These words were found in the last letter, left unfinished, of a native convert of the “greatest missionary of modern times,” Bishop Patteson, who was martyred in the South Sea Islands, in September 1871, and this convert with him. Oh, how he puts us to shame!)

It has happened to me—I daresay it has happened to every one of us—to be told by a Child-Patient, one who had been taught to say its prayers, that it “was afraid” to kneel down and “say its prayers” before a whole ward-full of people. Do we encourage and take care of such a little child? Shall we, when we have Wards under our own charge, take care that the Ward is kept so that none at proper times shall be “afraid” to kneel down and say their prayers? Do we reflect on the immense responsibility of a Nurse towards her helpless Sick, who depend upon her almost entirely for quiet, and thought, and order? Do we think that, as was once said, we are to no one as “rude” as we are to God?

I believe that one of our St. Thomas’ Sisters, who is just leaving us after years of good work, is going to set up a “Home” for Sick Children, where, under her, they will be cared for in all ways. I am sure that we shall all bid her “God speed.” And I know that many of those who have gone out from among us, and who are now Hospital Sisters or Nurses—they would not like me to mention their names—do care for their Patients, Children and all, in all ways. Thank God for it!

When a Patient, especially a child, sees you acting in all things as if in the presence of God—and none are so quick to observe it—then the names he or she heard at the Chaplain’s or the Sister’s or the Night Nurse’s lips become names of real things and real Persons. There is a God, a Father; there is a Christ, a Comforter; there is a Spirit of Goodness, of Holiness; there is another world, to such an one.

When a Patient, especially a Child, sees us acting as if there were no God, then there but too often becomes no God to him. Then words become to such a child mere words. And remember, that when such a Nurse—“salt” which has lost its “savour”—speaks to her Patients of God, she puts a hindrance in their way to keep them from God, instead of helping them to God. She had better not speak to them at all.

It is a terrible thought—I speak for myself—that we may prevent people from believing in God, instead of bringing them to “believe in God the Father Almighty.”

What is it, “setting an example”? An example—of what? Who is our example, that we are to set? Christ is our example, our pattern: this we all know and say. And when this was once said—a very common word—before a very uncommon man, he said: “When you have your picture taken, the painter does not try to make it rather like, or not very unlike. It is not a good picture if it is not exactly like.” Do we try to be exactly like Christ? If we do not, “are we His, or are we not?” Could it be said of each one of us: “That Nurse is (or is trying to be) exactly what Christ would have been in her place”?

Yet this is what every Nurse has to aim at. Aim lower: and you cannot say then, “Christ is my example.” Aim as high: and, after this life, “we shall be satisfied when we awake in His likeness.”

But this aim cannot be carried out, it cannot even be entertained, without the Parting Promise. The Parting Promise was fulfilled to the disciples ten days afterwards, on Whit-Sunday, when the Holy Spirit was given them—that is, when Christ came as He promised, and was with them.

Christ comes to each Nurse of us all: and stands at our little room-door and knocks. Do we let Him in?

The Holy Spirit comes, no more with outward show but with no less inward power, to each Ward and to each Nurse of us all, who is trying to do her Nursing and her Ward work in God, to live her hidden Nurse’s life with Christ in God.

When your Patient asks you for a drink, you do not give him a stone. And shall not our Heavenly Father much more give His Spirit to each one of us, His nurses, when she asks Him? (Are we His nurses?)

What is meant by the Spirit descending upon us Nurses, as it did on the first Whitsuntide? Is it not to put us in a state to nurse Him, by making our heart and our will His? (He has really told us that nursing our Patients is nursing Him.) God asks the heart: that is, that we should consecrate all our self to Him—within as well as without, within even more than without—in doing the Nursing work He has given each one of us here to do.

Is it not to have the spirit of love, of courtesy, of justice, of right, of gentleness, of meekness, in our Training School; the spirit of truth, of integrity, of energy and activity, of purity, which He is, in our Hospital? This it is to worship God in spirit and in truth. And we need not wait to go into a church, or even to kneel down at prayer, for this worship.

Is it not to feel that we desire really nothing for ourselves in our Nursing life, present and future, but only this, “Thy will be done,” as we say in our daily prayer? Is it not to trust Him, that His will is really the best for each one of us? How much there is in those two words, His will—the will of Almighty Wisdom and Goodness, which always knows what is best for each one of us Nurses, which always wills what is best, which always can do what it wills for our best.

Is it not to feel that the care and thought of ourselves is lost in the thought of God and the care of our Patients and fellow-Nurses and Ward-Maids? Is it not to feel that we are never so happy as when we are working with Him and for them? And we Nurses can always do this, if we will.

Is not this what Christ meant when He said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you”? “The kingdom of heaven” consists not in much speaking but in doing, not in a sermon but in a heart. “The kingdom of heaven” can always be in a Nurse’s blessed work, and even in her worries. Is not this what the Apostle meant when he told us to “rejoice in the Lord”? That is, to rejoice, whether Matrons, or Sisters, or Nurses, or Night Nurses, in the service of God (which, with us, means good Nursing of the Sick, good fellowship and high example as relates to our fellow-workers); to rejoice in the right, whoever does it; to rejoice in the truth, whoever has it; to rejoice in every good word and work, whoever it is; to rejoice, in one word, in what God rejoices in.

Let us thank God that some special aids to our spiritual life have been given us lately, for which I know many of us are thankful; and some of us have been able to keep this Whitsuntide as we never did before.

One little word more about our Training School. Training “consists in teaching people to bear responsibilities, and laying the responsibilities on them as they are able to bear them,” as Bishop Patteson said of Education. The year which we spend here is generally the most important, as it may be the happiest, of our lives.

Here we find many different characters. Here we meet on a common stage, before we part company again to our several posts. If there are any rich among us, they are not esteemed for their riches. And the poor woman, the friendless, the lonely woman, receives a generous welcome. Every one who has any activity or sense of duty may qualify herself for a future useful life. Every one may receive situations without any reference, except to individual capacity, and to a kind of capacity which it is within the power of the most humble and unfriended to work out. Every one who has any natural kindness or courtesy in her, and who is not too much wrapped up in herself, may make pleasant friends.

Although we know how many and serious faults we have, ought we not also to be able to find here some virtues which do not equally flourish in the larger world?—such as disinterested devotion to the calling we have chosen, and to which we can here fully give ourselves up without anxiety; warm-hearted interest in each other, for no one of us stands here in any other’s way; freedom from jealousy and meanness; a generous self-denial in nursing our charges, and a generous sympathy with other Nurses; above all, an interest in our work, and an earnestness in taking the means given us to improve ourselves in what is to be so useful to others.

And this is also the surest sign of our improvement in it. This is what St. Paul calls: “Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.”

Always, however, we must be above our work and our worries, keeping our souls free in that “hidden life” of which it has been spoken.

Above all, let us pray that God will send real workers into this immense “field” of Nursing, made more immense this year by the opening out of London District Nursing at the bedside of the sick poor at home. A woman who takes a sentimental view of Nursing (which she calls “ministering,” as if she were an angel), is of course worse than useless. A woman possessed with the idea that she is making a sacrifice will never do; and a woman who thinks any kind of Nursing work “beneath a Nurse” will simply be in the way. But if the right woman is moved by God to come to us, what a welcome we will give her, and how happy she will soon be in a work, the many blessings of which none can know as we know them, though we know the worries too! (Good Bishop Patteson used to talk to his assistants something in this way; would we were like him!)

Nurses’ work means downright work, in a cheery, happy, hopeful, friendly spirit. An earnest, bright, cheerful woman, without that notion of “making sacrifices,” etc., perpetually occurring to her mind, is the real Nurse. Soldiers are sent anywhere, and leave home and country for years; they think nothing of it, because they go “on duty.” Shall we have less self-denial than they, and think less of “duty” than these men? A woman with a healthy, active tone of mind, plenty of work in her, and some enthusiasm, who makes the best of everything, and, above all, does not think herself better than other people because she is a “Nightingale Nurse,” that is the woman we want.

(Must I tell you again, what I have had to tell you before, that we have a great name in the world for—conceit?)

I suppose, of course, that sound religious principle is at the bottom of her.

Now, if there be any young persons really in earnest whom any of you could wish to see engaged in this work, if you know of any such, and feel justified in writing to them, you will be aiding materially in this work if you will put it in their power to propose themselves as Candidates.

My every-day thought is—“How will God provide for the introduction of real Christianity among all of us Nurses, and among our Patients?” My every-day prayer (and I know that the prayer of many of you is the same) is that He will give us the means and show us how to use them, and give us the people. We ask you to pray for us, who have to arrange for you, as we pray for you, who have to nurse the Patients; and I know you do. The very vastness of the work raises one’s thoughts to God, as the only One by whom it can be done. That is the solid comfort—He knows. He loves us all, and our Patients infinitely more than we can. He is, we trust, sending us to them; He will bless honest endeavours to do His work among them. Without this belief and support, it seems to me, when we look at the greatness of the work, and how far, far we fall short of it, instead of being conceited, we should not have courage to work at all.

And when we say the words in the Communion Service—“Therefore with angels and archangels,” do we think whether we are fit company for angels? It may not be fanciful to believe that “angels and archangels,” to whom all must seem so different, may see God’s light breaking over the Nursing Service, though perhaps in our time it may not attain the perfect day. Only we must work on, and bring no hindrances to that light. And that not one of us may bring hindrances to that light, believe me, let us pray daily.

I have been longer than I intended or hoped, and will only say one more word.

May we each and all of us Nurses be faithful to the end, remembering this, that no one Nurse stands alone. May we not say, in the words of the prophet, that it is “The Lord” who “hath gathered” us Nurses “together out of the lands”? “It is because we do not praise as we proceed,” said a good and great man, “that our progress is so slow.” Should not all this Training School be so melted into one heart and mind, that we may with one heart and mind act and nurse and sing together our praise and thanksgiving, blessing and gratitude, for mercies, every one of which seems to belong to the whole School? For every Nurse alike belongs to the Mother School of which she is a part, and to the Almighty Father, who has sent her here, and to whom alone we each and all of us Nurses owe everything we have and are.

F. N.