This was the germ from which Miss Nightingale's philosophy of religion was developed. She had read much in metaphysics and in theology; she had reasoned long with herself

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

She reasoned long, but did not feel herself “in wandering mazes lost.” She began with considering the nature of Belief, and showed that any true explanation of the term throws us back on the nature of the object of belief. The supreme object of belief we call God. But in different ages men have meant very different things by God. There is the Savage idea of God, the Hindoo, the Greek, the Israelite, and so forth; and there is the Christian idea, which again is widely different according to the patristic or theological notions, and according to the popular one. This last required to be exalted and purified. The true idea of God, which is alone reconcilable with the deepest morality and with the widest contemplation of nature and history and the world is the idea, not of an individual swayed by likings and personalities, but of an Universal Being who is Law.

The laws of God were, she held, discoverable by experience, research, and analysis; or, as she sometimes put it, the character of God was ascertainable, though His essence might remain a mystery. The laws of God were the laws of life, and these were ascertainable by careful, and especially by statistical, inquiry. This is what I meant by saying in an earlier chapter that Miss Nightingale regarded the study of statistics with something of religious reverence. Statistics compiled by meteorologists have shown, she says in the Suggestions, that storms can be foreseen. When a ship goes down in an “unforeseen” gale, “Do we say, ‘How could God permit such a dreadful calamity as the loss of all hands on board? The devil must have done it.’ No. We say, ‘Study the signs of approaching gales, and you will not be lost.’ Is it not the same with moral evil, the laws of which are just as calculable?” A copy of Quetelet's book, already mentioned, had been presented to her “with the author's homage, respect, and affection.” She often spoke of the Belgian statistician in similar terms. His book was in her eyes a religious work—a revelation of the Will of God. In her annotated copy she enlarged the title. The book was not merely an Essai de physique sociale. It exhibited “The sense of Infinite power, The assurances of solid Certainty, and The endless vista of Improvement from the Principles of Physique sociale, if only found possible to apply on occasions when it is so much wanted.” A very large “if,” many will say; as in effect her father constantly said in written discussions with her on these subjects. But her reply was always the same. The greater the difficulty, the more the need for serious study. With the concentrated study of mankind upon the problem, the answer would be found. “Truth is so,” said her friend. “Truth is not what one troweth,” said she, and there was no phrase oftener on her lips in serious conversation.

She went on to develop this idea of God as Law in relation to human fate, and to those problems of “free will and necessity,” which Milton thought to be inscrutable mysteries, and around which metaphysicians and logicians have for ages disputed. She found her ultimate solution in a hypothesis which Mr. Mill told her that he had at one time tried but abandoned—the hypothesis of “a Being who, willing only good, leaves evil in the world solely in order to stimulate human faculties by an unremitting struggle against every form of it”; a Perfect Being who created a Perfectible one, and so ordered the world that its course should be a constant struggle towards perfection. Miss Nightingale did not blink the fact that her hypothesis left mysteries unexplained. The finite cannot apprehend the Infinite. “We cannot,” she wrote, “understand the existence of God willing laws. We cannot understand the Perfect Being. All this appears to me exactly what we ought to allow to be a mystery.”[356] But she held with Bossuet that il ne faut pas confondre la question de la nature de Dieu avec celle des rapports de Dieu et du monde. “We ought,” she continued, “with all our mights to learn the perfections, not to understand the Perfect—to study His character and His laws, not His essence, or how He lives willing His laws. It is evident that creation is a mystery, but God's end and object (in creating) need not be a mystery. Everybody tells us that the existence of evil is incomprehensible, whereas I believe it is much more difficult—it is impossible—to conceive the existence of God (or even of a good man) without evil.” Good and evil are relative terms, and neither is intelligible without the other.

Without supposing, then, that she had solved the ultimate riddle of the universe, Miss Nightingale had hold of an hypothesis which solved for her many of the mediate riddles. It seemed to her to contain a lofty conception of God; to justify His ways to men; to explain the supposed war between Free Will and Necessity. Her views on some of these high matters will perhaps be made clearer by the letter of explanation which she wrote to her father in sending him a copy of some of her “Stuff”:—

Old Burlington Street, July 6 [1859]. Dear Papa—I shall be so pleased to send you some of my “works,” as you are so good as to wish to read them. I have asked Aunt Mai to send you the shortest universal law all over this world, i.e. law or plan or constant sequences in the moral and intellectual as well as physical phenomena of the world—granted this, we must, in this universal law, find the traces of a Being who made it, and what is more of the character of the Being who made it. If we stop at the superficial signs, the Being is something so bad as no human character can be found to equal in badness, and certainly all the beings He has made are better than Himself. But go deeper and see wider, and it appears as if this plan of universal law were the only one by which a good Being could teach His creatures to teach themselves and one another what the road is to universal perfection. And this we shall acknowledge is the only way for any educator, whether human or divine, to act—viz. to teach men to teach themselves and each other. If we could not depend upon God, i.e. if this sequence were not always to be calculated upon in moral as well as in physical things—if He were to have caprices (by some called grace, by others answers to prayer, etc.), there would be no order in creation to depend upon. There would be chaos. And the only way by which man can have Free Will, i.e. can learn to govern his own will, to have what will he thinks right (which is having his will free), is to have universal Order or Law (by some miscalled Necessity). I put this thus brusquely because philosophers have generally said that Necessity and Free Will are incompatible. It seems to have appeared to God that Law is the only way, on the contrary, to give man his free will. And this I have attempted to prove. And further that this is the only plan a perfectly good omnipotent Being could pursue.… Ever, dear Papa, your loving child, F. N.

I need not enter into the fundamental difficulty which Mr. Mill found in this last assumption, nor into the difficulties which Mr. Jowett pointed out, in a series of letters, in Miss Nightingale's reconciliation of Free Will and Necessity. Our concern here is with what she thought, and the hypothesis satisfied her judgment.

It had the further result of giving her a rational basis for belief in a Future Life. The chapter in which she discussed this subject seemed to Mr. Jowett “the most responsible and serious in the whole book.” He made some critical objections to details in the argument, but her general line was in accordance with what we know to have been his own conviction on the subject, namely, that the evidence for a future life must be found in moral ideas.[357] And in a letter to Miss Nightingale he says: “I shall never give up the faith in immortality, though I cannot determine or conceive the manner of another state of being. That Christ became a mass of clay again seems to me of all incredible things the most incredible.” To Miss Nightingale the belief followed logically from her general hypothesis. The theory of Perfectibility required a future state of infinite progress for each and all; the theory of a good God required it. The purpose of God, as she conceived it, is that in the end “each and all shall in accordance with law desire and obtain to will right, all sin and sorrow being but one of the processes through which mankind is learning and teaching. Hence it is that belief in a future in connexion with human existence is essential to the belief that we are under righteous government.” “How plain,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his daughter, after reading the chapter, “are the steps of your argument! The senses, the reason, the feelings appreciate the laws of goodness, benevolence, and righteousness in the Thought of God; but Circumstances indicate a want of benevolence unless there is reason to believe in a future development. Therefore a continued existence is according to law.” Mr. Jowett in his marginalia suggested that she might have made more of the opposite alternative: “If there is no future state, then what of God, what of human nature? Not only would there be an awful deception, but a deception of all the best feelings and of those in which we most trust. Work out the supposition, and look it full in the face, and (whether right or wrong) it is hardly possible to suppress the temper of a demon towards the Supreme being.” So Miss Nightingale intensely thought; and, therefore, the idea of God as Universal Law, willing human perfection, gave her even greater security than is put forward in the lines from Clough which I have placed at the head of this chapter. She quoted them herself, but added, “Yes; but Truth is so that ‘I’ shall not perish.”

Her speculations gave her a basis, further, for understanding what is meant by a philosophy of history:—