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?