Oh, my dear friends, how terrible it will be to any one of us, some day, to hear another say, that she only did what she saw us do, if that was on the “road that leadeth to destruction”!
Or taking it another way, how delightful—how delightful to have set another on her journey to heaven by our good example; how terrible to have delayed another on her journey to heaven by our bad example!
There is an old story—nearly six hundred years old—when a ploughboy said to a truly great man, whose name is known in history, that he “advised” him “always to live in such a way that those who had a good opinion of him might never be disappointed.”
The great man thanked him for his advice, and—kept it.
If our School has a good name, do we live so that people “may never be disappointed” in its Nurses?
Obedient: not wilful: not having such a sturdy will of our own. Common sense tells us that no training can do us any good, if we are always seeking our own way. I know that some have really sought in dedication to God to give up their own wills to His. For if you enter this Training School, is that not in effect a promise to Him to give up your own way for that way which you are taught?
Let us not question so much. You must know that things have been thought over and arranged for your benefit. You are not bound to think us always right: perhaps you can’t. But are you more likely to be right? And, at all events, you know you are right, if you choose to enter our ways, to submit yours to them.
In a foreign Training School, I once heard a most excellent pastor, who was visiting there, say to a nurse: “Are you discouraged?—say rather, you are disobedient: they always mean the same thing.” And I thought how right he was. And, what is more, the Nurse thought so too; and she was not “discouraged” ever after, because she gave up being “disobedient.”
“Every one for herself” ought to have no footing here: and these strong wills of ours God will teach. If we do not let Him teach us here, He will teach us by some sterner discipline hereafter—teach our wills to bend first to the will of God, and then to the reasonable and lawful wills of those among whom our lot is cast.
I often say for myself, and I have no doubt you do, that line of the hymn: