I will mention two or three:
1. One said, “The greatest help I ever had in life was that we were taught in our Training School always to raise our hearts to God the first thing on waking in the morning.”
Now it need hardly be said that we cannot make a rule for this; a rule will not teach this, any more than making a rule that the chimney shall not smoke will make the smoke go up the chimney.
If we occupy ourselves the last thing at night with rushing about, gossiping in one another’s rooms; if our last thoughts at night are of some slight against ourselves, or spite against another, or about each other’s tempers, it is needless to say that our first thoughts in the morning will not be of God.
Perhaps there may even have been some quarrel; and if those who pretend to be educated women indulge in these irreligious uneducated disputes, what a scandal before those less educated, to whom an example, not a stone of offence, should be set!
“A thousand irreligious cursed hours” (as some poet says), have not seldom, in the lives of all but a few whom we may truly call Saints upon earth, been spent on some feeling of ill-will. And can we expect to be really able to lift up our hearts the first thing in the morning to the God of “good will towards men” if we do this?
I speak for myself, even more perhaps than for others.
2. Another woman[3] once said to me:—“I was taught in my Training School never to have those long inward discussions with myself, those interminable conversations inside myself, which make up so much more of our own thoughts than we are aware. If it was something about my duties, I went straight to my Superiors, and asked for leave or advice; if it was any of those useless or ill-tempered thoughts about one another, or those that were put over us, we were taught to lay them before God and get the better of them, before they got the better of us.”
A spark can be put out while it is a spark, if it falls on our dress, but not when it has set the whole dress in flames. So it is with an ill-tempered thought against another. And who will tell how much of our thoughts these occupy?
I suppose, of course, that those who think themselves better than others are bent upon setting them a better example.