We will not repeat here, because we are so fully persuaded of it, that a woman, especially a Nurse, must be a missionary, not as a minister or chaplain is, but by the influence of her own character, silent but not unfelt.
It was this, far more than any words, that gave his matchless influence to David Livingstone, whose body, brought upwards of 1500 miles through pathless deserts by his own negro servants—such a heroic feat as Christians never knew before—was buried this spring in Westminster Abbey. Some of us knew him: one of our Probationers was with him and his wife, who died in 1862, and Bishop Mackenzie, at their Mission Station in Africa. He was such a traveller and missionary as we shall never see again perhaps. But what he was in influence each of us may be, if we please, in our little sphere.
A Nurse is like a traveller, from the quantity of people who pass before her in the ever-changing wards. And she is like a traveller also in this, that, as Livingstone used to say, either the vices or the virtues of civilisation follow the footsteps of the traveller, and he cannot help it. So they do those of the Nurse. And missioning will be, whether she will or no, the background of her nursing, as it is the background of travelling. The traveller may call himself a missionary or not, as he likes. He is one, for good or for evil. So is the Nurse.
Livingstone used to say that we fancy a missionary a man with a Bible in his hand and another in his pack. He then went on to say what a real missionary must be in himself to have influence. And he added: “If I had once been suspected of a single act of want of purity or uprightness the negroes would never have trusted me again. No, not even the least pure or the least upright of the negroes. And any influence of mine would have been gone for ever.” What his influence was, even after his death, you know.
Then you must be missionaries, whether you will or no, among one another.
We need only think of the friendships that are made here. Will you be a missionary of good or of evil to your friend? Will you be a missionary of indifference, selfishness, lightness of conduct, self-indulgence? Or a missionary—to her and to your patients—of religious and noble devotion to duty, carried out to the smallest thing?
Will you be a “hero” in your daily work, like the dying child giving its hard-saved halfpence to the yet poorer child?
Livingstone always remembered that a poor old Scotchman on his death-bed had said to him: “Now, lad, make religion the every-day business of your life, not a thing of fits and starts; for if you do not, temptation and other things will get the better of you.”
Such a Nurse—one who makes religion the “every-day business of her life,” is a “Missionary,” even if she never speak a word. One who does not is a missionary for evil and not for good, though she may say many words, have many good texts at the end of her tongue, or, as Livingstone would say, a Bible in her hand and a Bible at her back.
Believe me, who have seen a good deal of the world, we may give you an institution to learn in, but it is You must furnish the “heroic” feeling of doing your duty, doing your best, without which no institution is safe, without which Training Schools are meat without salt. You must be our salt, without which civilisation is but corruption, and all churches only dead establishments.