“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,” says our Lord, “and I will give you rest.” But He adds immediately who those are to whom He will give this “rest” or quietness of mind—namely those, who, like Himself, are “meek and lowly of heart.”
These words may seem in a Hospital life “like dreams.” But they are not dreams if we take them for the spirit of our School and the rule of our Nursing. “To practise them, to feel them, to make them our own,” this is not far from the “kingdom of Heaven” in a Hospital.
Pray for me, as I do for you, that “piety” and a “quiet mind”—but these always and only in the strenuous effort to press forwards—may be ours.
Florence Nightingale.
III
July 23rd, 1874.
Another year has passed over us, my dear friends. There have been many changes among us. We have each of us tasted somewhat more of the discipline of life. To some of us it may have been very bitter; to others, let us hope, not so. By all, let us trust, it has been put to heroic uses.
“Heroic?” I think I hear you say; “can there be much of ‘heroic’ in washing porringers and making beds?”
I once heard a man (he is dead now) giving a lesson to some poor orphan girls in an Orphan Asylum. Few things, I think, ever struck me so much, or them. It was on the “heroic virtues.” It went into the smallest particulars of thrift, of duty, of love and kindness; and he ended by asking them how they thought such small people as themselves could manage to practise those great virtues. A child of seven put up its little nib and chirped out: “Please, my lord, we might pick up pins when we don’t like to.” That showed she understood his lesson.
His lesson was not exactly fitted to us, but we may all fit it to ourselves.