(From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery by Augustus Egg, R.A.)
The double-dealing of Russia was met by a gradual and tacit alliance between England and the Sultan; and Lord Aberdeen, whose love of peace has been described by one historian as “passionate” and “fanatical,” was unknowingly tying his own hands by the advice he gave in his despatches when consulted by Turkey. Moreover, in Turkey, our ambassador, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, stiffened the back of Ottoman resistance against the Czar’s wily handling of “the sick man.” Lord Stratford’s tact and force of character had moulded all to his will, and our admiral at Malta was told to obey any directions he received from him. Our fleets were ordered into the neighbourhood of the Dardanelles, and Lord Stratford held his watch at Therapia against the gathering wrath of the Czar. Only a very little kindling touch was needed to light the fires of a terrible conflict in Europe.
CHAPTER VI.
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.