_Pastor Fliedner._
A pebble thrown into a lake sends the tiny circling ripples very far,
and one good piece of work leads to others of a quite different kind.
Pastor Fliedner, inspired by love to his Master and deeply interested
in Elizabeth Fry’s efforts, began to help prisoners. Finding no nurses
for those of them who were ill, he was led to found the institution at
Kaiserswerth, where Miss Nightingale afterwards received a part of her
training.
His story is a beautiful one. His father and grandfather had both been
pastors in the Lutheran Church, and, like so many sons of the Manse, he
was exceedingly poor, but he lived to justify his name of Theodor. He was
born twenty years before Miss Nightingale, in the village of Eppstein,
and perhaps he was the more determined to prove to himself and others
that he had a soul, because he was one of those plump children who
get teased for looking like dumplings, and when his father laughingly
called him the “little beer-brewer” he didn’t like it, for he was a bit
thin-skinned. He worked his way bravely through school and college,
Giessen and Göttingen, and not only earned his fees by teaching, but also
his bread and roof; and when teaching was not enough, he had the good
sense to turn shoeblack and carpenter and odd man. He valued all that
opens the eyes of the mind and educates what is highest and best. Many
a time, heedless of hardship and privation, he would, in his holidays,
tramp long distances that he might see more of God’s world and learn
more of men and things. He taught himself in this way to speak several
languages, learned the useful healing properties of many herbs, and
other homely knowledge that afterwards helped him in his work among the
sick. Then, too, the games and songs that he picked up on his travels
afterwards enriched his own kindergarten. While tutoring at Cologne,
he did quite informally some of the work of a curate, and, through
preaching sometimes in the prison, became interested in the lot of
discharged prisoners. It was at Cologne too that he received from the
mother of his pupils kindly suggestions as to his own manners, which
led him to write what is as true as it is quaint, that “gentle ways and
polite manners help greatly to further the Kingdom of God.”
He was only twenty-two when he became pastor of the little Protestant
flock at Kaiserswerth, having walked there on foot and purposely taken
his parishioners by surprise that they might not be put to the expense
of a formal welcome. His yearly salary was only twenty pounds, and he
helped his widowed mother by sharing the parsonage with a sister and two
younger brothers, though in any case he had to house the mother of the
man who had been there before him. Then came a failure in the business
of the little town—the making of velvet—and though there were other rich
communities that would have liked to claim him, he was true to his own
impoverished flock, and set forth like a pilgrim in search of aid for
them. In this apostolic journey he visited Holland and England as well
as Germany, and it was in London that, in Elizabeth Fry, he found a noble
kindred spirit, much older, of course, than himself, as we count the time
of earth, but still full of all the tender enthusiasm of love’s immortal
youth. Her wonderful work among the prisoners of Newgate sent him back to
his own parish all on fire to help the prisoners of his own country, and
he began at once with Düsseldorf, the prison nearest home. Through him
was founded the first German organization for improving the discipline of
prisons.
Most of all he wanted to help the women who on leaving the prison doors
were left without roof or protector.
With his own hands he made clean his old summer-house, and in this
shelter—twelve feet square—which he had furnished with a bed, a chair,
and a table, he asked the All-father to lead some poor outcast to the
little home he had made for her.
It was at night that for the first time a poor forlorn creature came
in answer to that prayer, and he and his wife led her in to the place
prepared for her. Nine others followed, and, by the time the number had
risen to twenty, a new building was ready for them with its own field and
garden, and Fliedner’s wife, helped by Mademoiselle Gobel, who gave her
services “all for love and nothing for reward,” had charge of the home,
where many a one who, like the woman in the Gospel, “had been a great
sinner” began to lead a new life and to follow Christ.
For the children of some of these women a kindergarten arose; but the
work of all others on which the pastor’s heart was set was the training
of women to nurse and tend the poor; for in his own parish, where there
was much illness and ignorance, there was no one to do this. Three years
after his earlier venture, in 1836 when Miss Nightingale in her far-away
home was a girl of sixteen still more or less in the schoolroom, this new
undertaking was begun, this quiet haven, from which her own great venture
long afterwards took help and teaching, was built up by this German saint.
The failure of the velvet industry at Kaiserswerth, in the pastor’s
first year, had left an empty factory which he turned into a hospital.
But when it was opened, the faith needed was much like the faith of
Abraham when great blessing was promised to a son whom the world thought
he would never possess; for the Deaconess Hospital, when the wards were
fitted up by its pastor with “mended furniture and cracked earthenware,”
had as yet no patients and no deaconesses.
There is, however, one essential of a good hospital which can be bought
by labour as well as by money; and by hard work the hospital was kept
admirably clean.
The first patient who knocked at its doors was a servant girl, and
other patients followed so quickly that within the first year sixty
patients were nursed there and seven nurses had entered as deaconess and
probationers. All the deaconesses were to be over twenty-five, and though
they entered for five years, they could leave at any moment. The code
of rules drawn up by the pastor was very simple, and there were not any
vows; but the form of admission was a solemn one and included the laying
on of hands, while the pastor invoked the Threefold Name, saying: “May
God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God,
bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you
hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen.”
It all had a kind of homely grace, even in outward things. The
deaconesses wore a large white turned-down collar over a blue cotton
gown, a white muslin cap tied on under the chin with a large bow, and a
white apron—a dress so well suited to the work that young and old both
looked more than usually sweet and womanly in it.
The story of how the deaconesses found a head, and Fliedner a second
helper after the death of his first wife, reads rather like a Hans
Andersen fairy tale.
He travelled to Hamburg to ask Amalie Sievekin to take charge of the
Home, and as she could not do so, she advised him to go to her friend and
pupil Caroline Berthean, who had had experience of nursing in the Hamburg
Hospital.
The pastor was so pleased with Miss Caroline that he then and there
offered her the choice of becoming either his wife or the Superintendent
of the Deaconesses’ Home.
She said she would fill _both_ the vacant places, and their honeymoon was
spent in Berlin that they might “settle” the first five deaconesses in
the Charité Hospital.
Caroline, young though she was, made a good Deaconess Mother,[4] and she
seems also to have been an excellent wife, full of devotion to the work
her husband loved, through all the rest of her life. The deaconesses give
their work, and in a sense give themselves. They do not pay for their
board, but neither are they paid for their work, though they are allowed
a very simple yearly outfit of two cotton gowns and aprons, and every
five years a new _best_ dress of blue woollen material and an apron of
black alpaca. Also their outdoor garb of a long black cloak and bonnet
is supplied to them, and each is allowed a little pocket money. Their
private property remains their own to control as they please, whether
they live or die.
The little account of Kaiserswerth which Miss Nightingale wrote is most
rare and precious, having long been out of print, but from the copy in
the British Museum I transfer a few sentences to these pages, because of
their quaintness and their interest for all who are feeling their way in
the education of young children:—
“In the Orphan Asylum,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “each family
lives with its deaconess exactly as her children. Some of
them have already become deaconesses or teachers, some have
returned home. When a new child is admitted, a little feast
celebrates its arrival, at which the pastor himself presides,
who understands children so well that his presence, instead of
being a constraint, serves to make the little new-comer feel
herself at home. She chooses what is to be sung, she has a
little present from the pastor, and, after tea, at the end of
the evening, she is prayed for....
“One morning, in the boys’ ward, as they were about to have
prayers, just before breakfast, two of the boys quarrelled
about a hymn book. The ‘sister’ was uncertain, for a moment,
what to do. They could not pray in that state of mind, yet
excluding them from the prayer was not likely to improve them.
She told a story of her own childhood, how one night she had
been cross with her parents, and, putting off her prayers till
she felt good again, had fallen asleep. The children were quite
silent for a moment and shocked at the idea that anybody should
go to bed without praying. The two boys were reconciled, and
prayers took place....”
In the British Museum also is a copy of the following letter:—
“MESSRS. DUBAW,—A gentleman called here yesterday from you,
asking for a copy of my ‘Kaiserswerth’ for, I believe, the
British Museum.
“Since yesterday a search has been instituted—but only two
copies have been found, and one of those is torn and dirty. I
send you the least bad-looking. You will see the date is 1851,
and after the copies then printed were given away I don’t think
I have ever thought of it.
“I was twice in training there myself. Of course, since then
hospital and district nursing have made great strides. Indeed,
district nursing has been invented.
“But never have I met with a higher love, a purer devotion than
there. There was no neglect.
“It was the more remarkable because many of the deaconesses had
been only peasants (none were gentlewomen when I was there).
“The food was poor—no coffee but bean coffee—no luxury but
cleanliness.
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”