_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.:
Trustworthy,
Punctual,
Quiet and orderly,
Cleanly and neat,
Patient, cheerful, and kindly,
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 _dis_couraged?--say rather,
you are _dis_obedient: 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:
Tell me, Thou yet wilt chide, Thou canst not spare,
O Lord, Thy chastening rod.
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”;
“_any_body 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.)