In these days, when women are actively employed in Church work and philanthropy, and when their assistance is welcomed by the clergy in parishes all over the land, it seems strange to find how cautiously Miss Nightingale recommended the office of deaconess. She labours through scholastic arguments and cites the Fathers. St. Chrysostom speaks of forty deaconesses at work in Constantinople in the fourth century. Holy women of the order worked amongst the Waldensian, Bohemian and Moravian Brotherhoods. Luther complained of the lack of deaconesses in his neighbourhood, adding, “Women have especial graces to alleviate woe, and the words of women move the human being more than those of men.” Under Queen Elizabeth, deaconesses were instituted into the Protestant Church during public service. The Pilgrim Fathers when first driven to Amsterdam and Leyden carried their deaconesses with them, and Miss Nightingale cites the improving example of the Amsterdam deaconess who sat in her place at church with a little birchen rod in her hand to correct the children, and relates how she called upon the young maidens for their services, when they were sick, and she was “obeyed like a mother in Israel.”
She considers it clearly proved that before the establishment of the order of sisters of mercy by St. Vincent de Paul in 1633, the office of deaconess had been recognised by all divisions of Christians, and was therefore not borrowed from the Roman Catholic Church. The reason why such sisterhoods had not flourished among Protestants was owing to the lack of preparatory schools and training homes. This want had been supplied at the Kaiserswerth institution, and she proceeds to give a history of its foundation and growth. There she had found her ideal, and for the next few years her life was devoted to philanthropic and religious work. Military nursing had not as yet dawned upon her horizon.
CHAPTER VIII
A PERIOD OF WAITING
Visits the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris—Illness—Resumes Old Life at Lea Hurst and Embley—Interest in John Smedley’s System of Hydropathy—Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert’s Philanthropies—Work at Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses—Illness and Return Home.
They also serve who only stand and wait.—Milton.
Three years had yet to transpire before Florence Nightingale was called to her great life work. After leaving Kaiserswerth, she stayed for a time on her way home with the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris. She was without religious bigotry in the pursuit of knowledge, and sincerely admired the devoted and unselfish work of this Roman Catholic sisterhood. They were indeed sisters of mercy, and the hospitals and schools of their community had obtained world-wide renown. Their institutions had the advantage over Kaiserswerth, at that period, of being in long-established working order. In Paris, too, Miss Nightingale found opportunity for studying surgery in the hospitals. The skill of the Paris surgeons stood remarkably high, and she could scarcely have had a better ground for observation than the French capital. With her good friends the sisters, too, Miss Nightingale visited the homes of the poor and made a minute inspection of their methods of organised charity.
SIR WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL.
(Photo by Elliott & Fry.)
[To face p. 80.