“She is no idol to us, but we worship her memory as the most saintly
thing that was ever given to us. Her name is immortalized, both by her
own surpassing goodness, and by the love of a whole people for her—a
love that will survive through generations, and give a magic and a music
to those simple words, ‘Sister Dora,’ long after we shall have passed
away. There was little we could ever do—there was nothing she would let
us do—to relieve the self-imposed rigours of her life; but we love her
in all sincerity, and now in our helplessness we find a serene joy in
the knowledge that to her, as surely as to any human soul, will be
spoken the Divine words: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.’”
In Sister Dora, surely we have the highest type of the Christian life,
the inner and hidden life of the soul, the life that is hid with Christ
in God, combined with that outer life devoted to the doing of good to
suffering and needy humanity. In the cloistered nun we see only the
first, and that tends to become self-centred and morbid; it is redeemed
from this vice by an active life of self-sacrifice.
I cannot do better than, in conclusion, quote from the last letter ever
penned by Sister Dora:—
“It is 2.30 a.m., and I cannot sleep, so I am going to write to you. I
was anything but ‘forbearing,’ dear; I was overbearing, and I am truly
sorry for it now. I look back on my life, and see ‘nothing but leaves.’
Oh, my darling, let me speak to you from my deathbed, and say, Watch in
all you do that you have a single aim—_God’s_ honour and glory. ‘I came
not to work My own work, but the works of Him that sent Me.’ Look upon
working as a privilege. Do not look upon nursing in the way they do so
much now-a-days, as an art or science, but as work done for Christ. As
you touch each patient, think it is Christ Himself, and then virtue will
come out of the touch to yourself. I have felt that myself, when I have
had a particularly loathsome patient. Be full of the Glad Tidings, and
you will tell others. You cannot give what you have not got.”
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_Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._