In Sister Dora, surely we have the highest type of the Christian life, the inner and hidden life of the soul, the life that is hid with Christ in God, combined with that outer life devoted to the doing of good to suffering and needy humanity. In the cloistered nun we see only the first, and that tends to become self-centred and morbid; it is redeemed from this vice by an active life of self-sacrifice.
I cannot do better than, in conclusion, quote from the last letter ever penned by Sister Dora:—
“It is 2.30 a.m., and I cannot sleep, so I am going to write to you. I was anything but ‘forbearing,’ dear; I was overbearing, and I am truly sorry for it now. I look back on my life, and see ‘nothing but leaves.’ Oh, my darling, let me speak to you from my deathbed, and say, Watch in all you do that you have a single aim—God’s honour and glory. ‘I came not to work My own work, but the works of Him that sent Me.’ Look upon working as a privilege. Do not look upon nursing in the way they do so much now-a-days, as an art or science, but as work done for Christ. As you touch each patient, think it is Christ Himself, and then virtue will come out of the touch to yourself. I have felt that myself, when I have had a particularly loathsome patient. Be full of the Glad Tidings, and you will tell others. You cannot give what you have not got.”
Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
FOOTNOTES
[1]. Rom. Sott. ii. 125.
[2]. “Lectures on the Eastern Church,” 1869, p. 218.
[3]. Montalembert: Monks of the West, Book iv. c. 1.
[4]. Adams, “Chronicles of Cornish Saints,” in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 1873.