Eventually the ideas expressed in these letters were carried out in the arrangement of St. Hilda’s, which became not only a home for pupils who could not afford the normal boarding fees, but also a residence for senior students who needed more liberty than they could have in the other houses. By this means the house was put on a self-supporting basis. Miss Beale could have borne with no other. The Loan Fund, up to this time, had been the means of assisting over a hundred students. Miss Beale now asked a few personal friends to support it, pointing out that such a means of help was far better than any system of scholarships, which she never ceased to dislike, and against which she continually spoke and wrote. Her chief objections to scholarships have been already noted.[62] She was moreover opposed to the principle of material giving involved in the system. She only cared, at any time, to give what would embrace and ennoble character. She thought it best that people should pay for advantages received, thought they would value them more, thought it made girls more careful and self-denying when first the management of money came into their own hands, to feel that it was not their own to do as they pleased with. A mere gift seemed to her like a dead thing compared with the money which, lent and returned and then lent to others, was thus used over and over again. Yet the want of response to appeals for the Loan Fund must have been partly due to a difference of opinion on its method rather than to want of sympathy with Miss Beale’s aims. There are many who feel an objection to saddling with a loan a young teacher starting on her work, or who recognise that an unpaid loan may help to lower the standard in money affairs, and on that account shrink from giving help in this way. There are few indeed who could lend money so successfully as Miss Beale could, because there are few who could so successfully command repayment. Of the first £500 advanced by the Loan Fund, £495 was repaid in a very few years. The pressure she would exercise for repayment sometimes led to the wrong notion that she cared for money for its own sake. She had at all times great skill in wringing the utmost use out of a sum of money to promote those ends for which she lived; but in the ordinary commonplace sense she was indifferent to money and the things for which it is usually exchanged. Her own personal life was as bare of luxury when she was a rich woman as it was when her capital was reckoned in hundreds only. But she did care deeply for character, and anxiously avoided all forms of easy generosity which might injure those she sought to help.
For several years before a turf was cut for St. Hilda’s College, Miss Beale was, as she would herself have expressed it, building it: student teachers were being trained in the College, and in 1881 one of these passed the Cambridge Examination in the Theory and Practice of Education. Gradually she gathered an increasing body of students in a separate house—a house which was as unlike as any could possibly be to the beautiful home which was shortly to be opened. She waited year after year for money with which to build without interrupting the work she had begun in assisted education, and for the reasons named made no public appeal for it. It was enough, she maintained, to state the real needs—to show the value of a work by the way it was done—and thus let it make its own appeal for support. She had a horror of plant which might be a mere empty shell, or which in its establishment might become a diversion of energy from spiritual work. She felt this especially in the matter of church building, as may be seen in the following extract from a letter: ‘What I disapproved of was the amount of begging for the Cathedral. I do not disapprove of it, but I think you know what I felt. However, the Bishop will do all he can to make it a strong spiritual centre. I can never get over the feeling of spiritual destitution at one very beautiful cathedral.’ It was also, perhaps less consciously, a principle not to take money except from those who were willing for her to carry out her own ideas. She wrote to one friend in 1888:—
‘As regards our Students’ Home, I have given up the idea of a public meeting. It seemed not right to refuse the offer at first. But I shall go on with the work, and I doubt not the money will come. There is such a great need for training teachers. If we had a meeting things might be said and money be given in a way which would pledge us, or be thought to pledge us, and now we shall be free.’
And again in 1884 to one who helped her Oxford scheme:—
‘I grieve over that Protestant spirit which forbids people to read books, to associate with people, who do not think precisely in their way. Is this done in Science? No; we put various theories before the student and show why we accept them. But we don’t ever want to impose our beliefs; so I want not to impose mine in religion, but to bring the learner to the “fountain of living water.” Any transferred opinion is without root, and cannot endure the storm. Teachers must, if they are to help, gain the sympathy they need by entering into the religious modes of seeing and feeling of many different souls. I think in a University town they would come in contact with various influences, and in a house like St. Hilda’s I should want thoughtful people who have gone through some of the experience of life,—old teachers to help the young. There is a little more of my dream, but I am quite content to wait. If it be God’s will that such a house should grow up, the way will be pointed out. I felt I could not say all this to you when we meet, and I have got to care that you should not misunderstand me.’
As the time to begin the actual erection of the house drew near she had no exultation over the fulfilment of a dream. Yet in the beginning of August 1885, surrounded by young teachers from her own and other schools drawn together for a Retreat and a brief educational conference, her mind was naturally full of that dream. Some few of her own thoughts about it she wrote down; such as the following, with their characteristic heading:—
‘Sunday, Aug. 2, 1885—on St. Hilda’s. Some thoughts at church.
‘God fulfils Himself in many ways. Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
‘How often have we seen endowments thus rendered injurious, not helpful. So it is with many of the institutions around us. Can we hope better things from this one? No, we can only hope for it not a perfection but a temporary usefulness. “He, after he had served his generation according to the will of God, fell on sleep”;—so it is with men, so with institutions, they need not a body but a spirit. As long as the spirit lives the body is the instrument of all good works. When the spirit dies, the body becomes the source of disease and corruption. For this reason I have cared more to awaken the spirit than to gather funds and build first. The spirit will, I hope, shape the body.