The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade.
And do not expect more of them than friends can give, or weary them with demands for sympathy; and do not let the womanliness of friendship be impaired by any silliness or sentimentalism; or allow hearty and genial good-will to degenerate into vulgarity and noise.
And as was once truly said, friendship perhaps appears best, as it did in St. Paul, in his manner of rebuking those who had erred, “transferring their faults in a figure to Apollos and to himself.” “No one knew how to speak the truth in love like him.”
It has been said of Romans xii.: “What rule of manners can be better than this chapter?” “She that giveth, let her do it with simplicity”; that is, let us do our acts of Nursing and kindness as if we did not make much of them, as unto the Lord and not to men. “Like-minded one towards another”; that is, we should have the same thoughts and feelings with others. “Rejoicing with them that rejoice, and weeping with them that weep”; going out of ourselves and entering into the thoughts of others.
And have we St. Paul’s extraordinary regard for the feelings of others? He was never too busy to think of these. “If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no more meat while the world standeth,” he says, though he well knew such scruples were really superstitions. If the spirit of these words could find a way to our women’s hearts, we might be able to say, “See how these Christians (Nurses) love one another!”
Then the courtesy we owe, one woman to another: “for the happiness and the good” of our work and our School is not simply “made up of great duties and virtues, nor the evil of the opposite.” But both seem to consist also in a number of small particulars, which, small as they are, have a great effect on the tone and character of our School, introducing light or darkness into the “Home,” sweetness or bitterness into our intercourse with one another.
And, as to our Wards: Christ, we may be sure, did not lose authority, or dignity and refinement, “even in the company of publicans and harlots,” just as we may observe in the Wards, that there are a few of us whose very refinement makes them do the coarsest and roughest things there with simplicity. A Sister of ours once remarked this of one of her Probationers (who was not a lady in the common sense of the word, but she was the truest gentlewoman in Christ’s sense), that she was too refined (most people would have said, to do the indelicate work of the Wards, but she said) to see indelicacy in doing the nastiest thing; and so did it all well, without thinking of herself, or that men’s eyes were upon her. That is real dignity—the dignity which Christ had—on which no man can intrude, yet combined with the greatest gentleness and simplicity of life.
II
And let me say a word about self-denial: because, as we all know, there can be no real Nursing without self-denial. We know the story of the Roman soldier, above fourteen hundred years ago, who, entering a town in France with his regiment, saw a sick man perishing with cold by the wayside—there were no Hospitals then—and, having nothing else to give, drew his sword, cut his own cloak in half, and wrapped the sick man in half his cloak.
It is said that a dream visited him, in which he found himself admitted into heaven, and Christ saying, “Martin hath clothed me with this garment”: the dream, of course, being a remembrance of the verse, “When saw we thee sick or in prison, and came unto thee?” and of the answer, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” But whether the story of the dream be true or not, this Roman soldier, converted to Christianity, became afterwards one of the greatest bishops of the early ages, Martin of Tours.