THE MYSTICAL WAY
Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the
things of sense into communion with God--to endeavour to partake of
the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only
what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then
we may truly be said to live in His light.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
It has been mentioned incidentally in an earlier chapter that Miss
Nightingale was fond of reading the books of Catholic devotion which the
Reverend Mother of the Bermondsey Convent used to send her. Long before,
she had studied carefully the writings of the Port Royalists; and at the
Trinità de' Monti she had seen the ideal of Catholic devotion in real
life. She used to pass on some of her devotional works to Mr. Jowett. He
began with St. Teresa, and, at first repelled, he gradually became
interested. Miss Nightingale was in the habit of copying out passages
for her own edification, sometimes in the original, sometimes
translating them. The idea of making a selection for publication
occurred to her, and Mr. Jowett encouraged it. "Do not give up your
idea," he said, "of making a selection of the better mind of the Middle
Ages and the Mystics." "You will do a good work," he wrote again (Oct.
3, 1872), "if you point out the kind of mysticism which is needed in the
present day--not mysticism at all, but as intense a feeling, as the
mystics had, of the power of truth and reason and of the will of God
that they should take effect in the world. The passion of the reason,
the fusion of faith and reason, the reason in religion and the religion
in reason--if you can only describe these, you will teach people a new
lesson. The new has something still to learn from the old; and I am not
certain whether we ought not to retire into mysticism (I thought I
should not use the word) when the antagonism with existing opinions
becomes too great." Miss Nightingale's close study of Plato and of the
Bible, described in the last chapter, increased her interest in
Christian mysticism. The Fourth Gospel was the work of a mystic. And
there were curious analogies, which she pointed out to Mr. Jowett,[145]
between Plato and the mediæval mystics. The famous myth of the purified
soul, for instance, recalled a passage in the _Fioretti_ of St. Francis,
except that there the purgatorial stage, before the "wings grow," lasts
150 years, instead of 10,000. Miss Nightingale said of the closing
prayer in the _Phaedrus_--"Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may
the outward and inward man be at one"--a prayer unequalled, she thought,
by any Collect in the service-book--that it "put in seventeen words the
whole, or at least half, of the doctrine of St. John of the Cross."
Plato made her the more interested in the Christian Mystics; the
Christian Mystics, the more interested in Plato. Concurrently with her
work for Mr. Jowett's revised _Plato_ she gave much time during 1873 and
1874 (with additions in later years) to transcribing or translating and
arranging passages from devotional writers of the Middle Ages. She had
sent some of her book in various stages to Mr. Jowett, who, with other
suggestions, said (April 18, 1873) that she ought to add "a Preface
showing the use of such books. They are apt to appear unreal, and yet
Thomas à Kempis has been one of the most influential books in the world.
The subject of the Preface should be the use of the ideal and especially
the spiritual ideal. I do not say what may be the case with great Saints
themselves, but for us I think it is clear that this mystic state ought
to be an occasional and not a permanent feeling--a taste of heaven in
daily life. Do you think it would be possible to write a mystical book
which would also be the essence of Common Sense?"
[145] He made use of her suggestion in a postscript (in the _second_
edition) to his Introduction to the _Phaedrus_.
II
I construct the Preface from various notes and rough drafts in Miss
Nightingale's hand:--
It may seem a strange thing to begin a book with:--this Book is not
for any one who has time to read it--but the meaning of it is: this
reading is good only as a preparation for work. If it is not to
inspire life and work, it is bad. Just as the end of food is to
enable us to live and work, and not to live and eat, so the end
of--most reading perhaps, but certainly of--mystical reading is not
to read but to work.
For what is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God,
not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not
merely a hard word for "The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is
neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only _here_
but _now_. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only
health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of
God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God
for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be _here_ and _now_, as
well as _there_ and _then_. And it may be for a time--then
lost--then recovered--both _here_ and _there_, both _now_ and
_then_.
That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love
of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics--as is more
particularly set forth in a definition of the 16th century: "True
religion is to have no other will but God's." Compare this with the
definition of Religion in Johnson's _Dictionary_: "Virtue founded
upon reverence of God and expectation of future rewards and
punishments"; in other words on respect and self-interest, not
love. Imagine the religion which inspired the life of Christ
"founded" on the motives given by Dr. Johnson!
Christ Himself was the first true Mystic. "My meat is to do the
will of Him that sent me and to finish His work." What is this but
putting in fervent and the most striking words the foundation of
all real Mystical Religion?--which is that for all our actions, all
our words, all our thoughts, the food upon which they are to live
and have their being is to be the indwelling Presence of God, the
union with God; that is, with the Spirit of Goodness and Wisdom.
Where shall I find God? In myself. That is the true Mystical
Doctrine. But then I myself must be in a state for Him to come and
dwell in me. This is the whole aim of the Mystical Life; and all
Mystical Rules in all times and countries have been laid down for
putting the soul into such a state. That the soul herself should be
heaven, that our Father which is in heaven should dwell in her, that
there is something within us infinitely more estimable than often
comes out, that God enlarges this "palace of our soul" by degrees so
as to enable her to receive Himself, that thus he gives her liberty
but that the soul must give herself up absolutely to Him for Him to
do this, the incalculable benefit of this occasional but frequent
intercourse with the Perfect: this is the conclusion and sum of the
whole matter, put into beautiful language by the Mystics. And of
this process they describe the steps, and assign periods of months
and years during which the steps, they say, are commonly made by
those who make them at all.
These old Mystics whom we call superstitious were far before us in
their ideas of God and of prayer (that is of our communion with
God). "Prayer," says a mystic of the 16th century, "is to ask not
what we wish of God, but what God wishes of us." "Master who hast
made and formed the vessel of the body of Thy creature, and hast
put within so great a treasure, the Soul, which bears the image of
Thee": so begins a dying prayer of the 14th century. In it and in
the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition.
There is never a word of the theory that God's dealings with us are
to show His "power"; still less of the theory that "of His own good
pleasure" He has "predestined" any souls to eternal damnation.
There is little mention of heaven for self; of desire of happiness
for self, none. It is singular how little mention there is either
of "intercession" or of "Atonement by Another's merits." True it is
that we can only _create_ a heaven for _ourselves and others_ "by
the merits of Another," since it is only by working in accordance
with God's Laws that we can do anything. But there is nothing at
all in these prayers as if God's anger had to be bought off, as if
He had to be bribed into giving us heaven by sufferings merely "to
satisfy God's justice." In the dying prayers, there is nothing of
the "egotism of death." It is the reformation of God's church--that
is, God's children, for whom the self would give itself, that
occupies the dying thoughts. There is not often a desire to be
released from trouble and suffering. On the contrary, there is
often a desire to suffer the greatest suffering, and to offer the
greatest offering, with even greater pain, if so any work can be
done. And still, this, and all, is ascribed to God's _goodness_.
The offering is not to buy anything by suffering, but--If only the
suppliant can do anything for God's children!
These suppliants did not live to see the "reformation" of God's
children. No more will any who now offer these prayers. But at
least we can all work towards such practical "reformation." The way
to live with God is to live with Ideas--not merely to think about
ideals, but to do and suffer for them. Those who have to work on men
and women must above all things have their Spiritual Ideal, their
purpose, ever present. The "mystical" state is the essence of common
sense.
The authors whom Miss Nightingale read for the purpose of her selection
included St. Angela of Foligno, Madame de Chatel, St. Francis of Assisi,
St. Francis Xavier, St. John of the Cross, Peter of Alcantara, Father
Rigoleuc, St. Teresa, and Father Surin. She arranged her extracts from
these and other writers under headings, and supplied marginal summaries.
She prepared also a title-page:--_Notes from Devotional Authors of the
Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen, and Freely Translated by Florence
Nightingale_.
III
This and all other literary work was interrupted, however, at the
beginning of 1874 by the death of her father. She was in London; her
sister and Sir Harry Verney were with him and Mrs. Nightingale at
Embley. He was 80; but, though his strength of body and mind had failed
a little, he had been out for his usual ride a few days before. Lady
Verney had wished him good-night. "Say not good-night," he said in
reply, quoting Mrs. Barbauld, "but in some brighter clime Bid me
good-morning." A day or two later, he came down to breakfast as usual,
but found that he had forgotten his watch. He went to fetch it, slipped
upon the stairs, and died on the spot. Miss Nightingale felt the loss of
her father deeply. "His reverent love for you," wrote Lord Houghton in a
letter of condolence (Jan. 13, 1874), "was inexpressibly touching," and
her love for him, though of a different kind, was very tender. Unlike in
many respects, father and daughter were yet kindred spirits in
intellectual curiosity, in a taste for speculative inquiry. M. Mohl
noted among Mr. Nightingale's engaging characteristics "a modest
curiosity about everything, a surprised, innocent, incredulous smile as
he listened intently." Miss Irby spoke of his "exceeding sweetness and
childlikeness of wisdom." These qualities were conspicuous in much
of his intercourse with his daughter Florence, and she was now deprived
of the father who had, in things of the mind, sat at her feet and
sympathized in her searches after truth. The death of her father was
quickly followed, on January 31, 1874, by that of her dearly loved
friend, Mrs. Bracebridge. "She was more than mother to me," wrote
Florence to M. and Madame Mohl (Feb. 3); "and oh that I could not be a
daughter to her in her last sad days! What should I have been without
her? and what would many have been without her? To one living with her
as I did once, she was unlike any other human being: as unlike as a
picture of a sunny scene is to the real light and warmth of sunshine: or
as this February lamp we call our sun is to her own Sun of living light
in Greece.... Other people live together to make each other worse: she
lived with all to make them better. And she was not like a chastened
Christian saint: no more like that than Apollo; but she had qualities
which no Greek God ever had--real humility (excepting my dear Father, I
never knew any one so really humble), and with it the most active heart
and mind and buoyant soul that could well be conceived." Mr. Bracebridge
had died eighteen months before (July 18, 1872), and Miss Nightingale
had said: "He and she have been the creators of my life. And when I
think of him at Scutari, the only man in all England who would have
lived with willingness such a pigging life, without the interest and
responsibility which it had to me, I think that we shall never look upon
his like again. And when I think of Atherstone, of Athens, of all the
places I have been in with them, of the immense influence they had in
shaping my own life--more than earthly father and mother to me--I cannot
doubt that they leave behind them, having shaped many lives as they did
mine, their mark on the century--this century which has so little ideal
at least in England. They were so immeasurably above any English
'country gentry' I have ever known." Miss Nightingale's estimate of her
friends was shared by others who had enjoyed their hospitality. "The
death of Mrs. Bracebridge," wrote M. Mohl (Feb. 14), "is a sad blow for
you. The breaking of these old associations which nothing new can
replace impoverishes one's life, and a part of ourselves dies out with
old friends even if they have not been to us what Mrs. Bracebridge was
to you. _Und immer stiller wird's und stiller auf unserm Pfad_ until the
great problem of life opens for ourselves. Two better people than the
Bracebridges, different as they were, I have never seen. Madame
d'Abbadie has a queer expression for a woman she approves of; she says
_elle est honnête homme_, and nothing is more appropriate to Mrs.
Bracebridge. I can never think of Atherstone without emotion; it is
people like these in whom lies the glory of England and the strength of
the country. They were so genuine, so ready to help and to impoverish
themselves for public purposes, and to do it unostentatiously and
without fishing for popularity." To the end of her life Miss Nightingale
cherished the memory of these faithful and helpful friends. "To my
beloved and revered friends," she said in her Will, "Mr. Charles
Bracebridge and his wife, my more than mother, without whom Scutari and
my life could not have been, and to whom nothing that I could ever say
or do would in the least express my thankfulness, I should have left
some token of my remembrance had they, as I expected, survived me." The
death of her companion at Scutari removed one of the few links with Miss
Nightingale's happier past. The death of her father was not only a
bereavement which she felt deeply; it also involved her in much
distracting business. Her father's landed properties, at Embley and Lea
Hurst, now passed, under the entail, to his sister, "Aunt Mai," and her
husband. Florence did not attend her father's funeral, but soon she went
down to Embley to look after her mother. There, and afterwards in
London, she was immersed in worrying affairs. Her only comfort, she
wrote repeatedly in private notes, was the "goodness" of Mr. Shore
Smith--"her boy" of old days. The letters of Mr. Coltman, one of her
father's executors, were full of humour, but Florence was never able to
take things lightly. There were questions of property and residence to
be discussed; servants to be dismissed and engaged; her mother's
immediate movements and future mode of life to be settled. Everybody had
a different plan, and Florence complained that nobody but she had the
same plan for two days running. Her letters and notes at this period
are of a quite tragic intensity. Something may be ascribed to a
characteristic over-emphasis. "We Smiths," she said once of herself,
"all exaggerate"; and Mr. Jowett said of some remarks made by her about
him: "You are as nearly right as an habitual spirit of exaggeration will
ever allow you to be." "We are a great many too many strong characters,"
she wrote of herself and her family, "and very different: all pulling
different ways. And we are so dreadfully _au sérieux_. Oh, how much good
it does us to have some one to laugh at us!"
But there was no exaggeration in one of her woes. A third of her time
was taken up with the Nightingale Nurses; another third with Indian
affairs (for in relation to India, as we shall hear, she never quite
"went out of office"); the remaining third, which might have been
devoted to working out a scheme of social and moral science on the
statistical methods of M. Quetelet, or on preparing for the press her
selections from the Mystics, was being wasted in family worries. M.
Quetelet, with whom she had been corresponding, had recently died. "I
cannot say," she wrote to Dr. Farr (Feb. 23, 1874), "how the death of
our old friend touches me: he was the founder of the most important
science in the whole world. Some months ago I prepared the first sketch
of an Essay I meant to publish and dedicate to him on the application of
his discoveries to explain the Plan of God in teaching us by these
results the laws by which our Moral Progress is to be attained. I had
pleased myself with thinking that this would please him. But painful and
indispensable business prevented the finishing of my paper." "O God,"
she exclaimed in the bitterness of her heart, "let me not sink in these
perplexities: but give me a great cause to do and die for." And again:
"What makes the difference between man and woman? Quetelet did his work,
and I am so disturbed by my family that I can't do mine."
IV
So, then, Miss Nightingale never finished her book on the Mystics; but
she did something which, if we take her view of literary work, we may
account far better; she lived it. No words of Florence Nightingale's
that have been quoted in the course of this Memoir are more intensely
autobiographical, none express more truly the spirit in which she lived
and moved and had her being, than those which I have put together on a
preceding page from her Notes on the Mystics. Her creed may seem cold to
some minds, but she invested it with a spiritual fervour which none of
the Mystics has surpassed. This woman, so practical, so business-like,
and in her outward dealings with men and affairs so worldly-wise, was a
dreamer, a devotee, a religious enthusiast. The Lady-in-Chief, who was
to others a tower of strength, was to herself a weak vessel, praying
continually for support, and conscious, with bitter intensity, of
short-coming, of faithlessness, of rebellion to the will of God.
Self-possessed in the presence of others, she was tortured and agonized,
often to the verge of despair, in the solitude of her chamber. "I have
done nothing for seven years," she said to a friend, "but write
regulations." And that was broadly true of one side of her life. Of
another side, she might have said with almost equal truth, "I have done
nothing all my life but write spiritual meditations." She lived with a
pen or pencil ever at her side; and reams of her paper are covered with
confessions, self-examinations, communings with God. She suffered much,
and especially during these years, from sleeplessness, and in the
watches of the night she would turn to read the Mystics for comfort, or
to write on her tablets for spiritual exercise. Though she liked best
the books of the Catholic saints, her Catholicism was wider than theirs,
and she could find spiritual kinship also, as in the lines prefixed to
the present Part, with the hymns of American evangelists. At one and the
same time mystic and practical administrator, Miss Nightingale had two
soul-sides; but each was a reflection of the other. Her religion was her
work; and her work was her religion. She read the Mystics, not to lull
her active faculties into contemplative ecstasy, but to consecrate them
to more perfect service. In one place she makes these notes from St.
Catherine of Siena:--"It is not the occupation but the spirit which
makes the difference. The election of a bishop may be a most secular
thing. The election of a representative may be a religious thing. It is
not the preluding such an election with public prayer that would make it
a religious act. It is religious so far as each man discharges his part
as a duty and a solemn responsibility. The question is not whether a
thing is done for the State or the Church, but whether it is done with
God or without God." Miss Nightingale's heading to this passage was
"Drains." She applied her religion to every aspect of her life; and in
her meditations, passages of solemn profundity are sometimes side by
side with entries of a quaint, and almost humorous, directness, like a
gargoyle above a church porch or a dog in a Madonna picture. "O Lord I
offer him to Thee. He is so _heavy_. Do Thou take care of him. _I_
can't." "I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my
cats." Such passages are thought "profane" by professors of a purely
formal religion; but are characteristic of the true mystics in all
denominations.
The mystical self-abasement of the Saints was never more complete than
in the private meditations of Florence Nightingale. Once in the middle
of the night she started up and saw pictures on the wall by the
night-light lamp. "Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height? 'The
Lady with a Lamp shall stand.' The lamp shows me only my utter
shipwreck." From the year 1872 onwards, when she went "out of office,"
and with increased intensity after her father's death, Miss
Nightingale's mood, in all communings with herself, was of deep
dejection and of utter humbleness. The notes are often heart-rending in
their impression of loneliness, of craving for sympathy which she could
not find, of bitter self-reproach. The loss of friends may account for
something of all this, and even her friendship with Mr. Jowett had now
lost somewhat of its consoling power. She felt that she gave more
sympathy than she received; she sometimes found her interviews with him
exhausting or disturbing; "he talks to me," she said once, "as if I were
some one else." The strange manner of her life should be remembered. Her
habit of seeing only one person at a time, and that at set times, must
have made intercourse rather formidable for both parties. Nobody, even
if staying in the house, ever _happened_ to come into her room, and no
outside visitor appeared unexpectedly. She never had the relief of
hearing two other people talk, or of witnessing, even for a moment, two
other personalities in contact. Something too must be accounted to the
fact that many of her meditations were written at night or in the early
morning hours when she could not sleep. Periods of sleepless dejection,
which in the lives of most men and women leave little record of
themselves behind, were by her spent in writing down their weary tale.
No doubt, the self-expression gave relief; and she would often turn at
the instant from her tablets of despair to amuse a visitor with humorous
conversation, or write a vivacious letter to a friend.
These are considerations for which allowance must be made in estimating
what was morbid in Miss Nightingale's moods. But for the most part the
despondency and the self-abasement which coloured her meditations, and
which sometimes appear in her letters, were the expression of the
mystical way of her soul. They are the utterance of a soul which was
striving after perfection, and found the path difficult and thorny. Miss
Nightingale was masterful and eager; she had often been able to impress
her will upon men and upon events; she found it difficult to bear
disappointments and vexations with that entire resignation which the
mystics taught her. She was "out of office"; she had been interrupted,
suddenly and painfully, in a long career of almost unceasing action. The
pause in her public life gave her new occasion for self-criticism and
fresh consciousness of the difficulty of sustaining in active life that
absolute purity of motive which makes light even of success or failure.
She strove to attain, and she taught others to ensue, passivity in
action--to do the utmost in their power, but to leave the result to a
Higher Power. In a poem which gave her much comfort in later years she
marked this passage:--
Abstaining from attachment to the work,
Abstaining from rewardment in the work,
While yet one doeth it full faithfully,
Saying, "'Tis right to do!"--that is true act
And abstinence! Who doeth duties so,
Unvexed if his work fail, if it succeed
Unflattered, in his own heart justified,
Quit of debates and doubts, his is "true" act.[146]
[146] Sir Edwin Arnold's _The Song Celestial_ (translated from the
Mahâbhârata): see below, p. 401.
But the lesson was hard to learn. "There are trying days before us," she
wrote to one of her dearest friends (Aug. 1873); "however, we cannot
change a single 'hair'; we must look to Him 'Alike who grasps eternity,
And numbers every hair.' I don't know that it is ever difficult to me to
entrust my 'hair' to Him, but to entrust A.'s, and yours, and poor
matron's I find very difficult. And I thought He did not take care of
B.'s hairs. What a reprobate I am!" And a worse "reprobate" than this
letter says; for in fact she did find it very difficult to entrust even
her own "hair to Him"--as she confessed in another letter to the same
friend: "God is displeased when we enquire too anxiously. A soul which
has really given itself to God does His will in the present, and trusts
to the Father for the future. Now it is twenty years to-day [Aug. 11,
1873] since I entered 'public life'--and I have not learnt that lesson
yet--though the greater part of those twenty years have been as
completely out of my hands to mould, and in His alone, as if they had
been the movements of the planets." The surrender of her will to the
keeping of the Supreme Will was the spiritual perfection at which she
most continuously aimed. In consciousness of failure, she reproached
herself for censoriousness, rebellion, impatience. She knew that some of
all this, and much of her dejection, were morbid, and warned others
against the like weakness. "Do not depend, darling," she wrote to a
friend, "upon 'light' in one sort of mystical way. There are things, as
I know by experience, in which He sends us light by the hard good sense
of others, not by our going over in sickness and solitude one thought,
or rather feeling, over and over again by ourselves, which rather
brings darkness. I have felt this so much in my lonely life." But there
was another mystical way in which she found strength. In her spiritual
life, which was at once the complement and the sustaining source of her
outward life, she followed, as she was fond of writing, "the Way of the
Cross." There were moments indeed, but they were rare, in which she was
inclined to draw back, and when her faith grew faint. "O my Creator, art
Thou leading every man of us to perfection? Or is this only a
metaphysical idea for which there is no evidence? Is man only a constant
repetition of himself? Thou knowest that through all these 20 horrible
years [1873] I have been supported by the belief (I think I must believe
it still or I am sure I could not work) that I was working with Thee who
wert bringing every one, even our poor nurses, to perfection." Yet from
every doubt her assurance grew the stronger; and as she followed the Way
of the Cross, she rose triumphant over suffering, finding in each loss
of human sympathy a lesson that she should throw herself more entirely
into the Eternal Arms, and in every outbreak of human despondency or
rebellion a call to closer union with the Eternal Goodness. "O Father, I
submit, I resign myself," she wrote in one of hundreds of similar
meditations, "I accept with all my heart this stretching out of Thy hand
to save me: Deal with me as Thou seest meet: Thy work begin, Thy work
complete. O how vain it is, the vanity of vanities, to live in men's
thoughts, instead of God's." And again: "Wretch that I was not to see
that God was taking from me all human help in order to compel me to lean
on Him alone." She had little interest in rites and ceremonies as such,
and she interpreted the doctrines of Christianity in her own way; but
she found great comfort in the Communion Service, as an expression of
the individual believer's participation in the sufferings and the
triumph of the greatest of the Mystics. For some years she entered in
her diary a text from the mystical writers for each day. She took to
herself their devotion, their communion with God, their self-surrender;
she adjusted their doctrine to her own beliefs. "I believe," she wrote,
"in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And in Jesus
Christ, His best son, our Master, who was born to show us the way
through suffering to be also His sons and His daughters, His handmen and
His handmaidens, who lived in the same spirit with the Father, that we
may also live in that Holy Spirit whose meat was to do His Father's will
and to finish His work, who suffered and died saying, 'That the world
may love the Father.' And I believe in the Father Almighty's love and
friendship, in the service of man being the service of God, the growing
into a likeness with Him by love, the being one with Him in will at
last, which is Heaven. I believe in the plan of Almighty Perfection to
make us all perfect. And thus I believe in the Life Everlasting."
This was the creed by which Miss Nightingale guided her life; this, the
path to perfection along which she ever moved. There was nothing
ecstatic in her mysticism, though she notes occasionally that she heard
"The voice," and often that she was conscious of receiving "strong
impressions." They were impressions which came in moments of imaginative
insight, but yet which followed rationally from self-examination and
meditation on her creed. Patience and resignation were the states of the
purified soul which she found hardest of attainment. She marked for her
edification many a passage from devotional writers in which such virtues
are enjoined; as in this from Thomas à Kempis: "Oh Lord my God, patience
is very necessary for me, for I perceive that many things in this life
do fall out as we would not.... It is so, my son. But my will is that
thou seek not that peace which is void of temptations, or which
suffereth nothing contrary; but rather think that thou hast found peace,
when thou art exercised with sundry tribulations and tried in many
adversities." Her tribulations were often caused, she confessed, by her
impatience. "O Lord, even now I am trying to snatch the management of
Thy world out of Thy hands." The middle path of perfection between the
acquiescence of the quietist and the impatience of the worker was hard.
"Too little have I looked for something higher and better than my own
work--the work of Supreme Wisdom, which uses us whether we know it or
not. O God to Thy glory not to mine whatever happens, may be all my
thought!"
Miss Nightingale's meditations, written in the purgatorial stage, are
many and poignant. But there were times also when the mount of
illumination was reached, when "the palace of her soul" was enlarged to
receive the indwelling Presence, and she found the perfect peace of
the mystic in the consciousness of union with the Supreme Wisdom; times
when on the wings of the soul she attained with Dante to the empyrean:--
Lume è lassù che visibile face
Lo Creatore a quella creatura,
Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.
Perfected in weakness, she was strong in moments of illumination "to see
God in all things, and all things in God, the Eternal shining through
the accidents of space and time." [147]
[147] Letter to Mr. Jowett, April 17, 1873.