(Miss Nightingale to her Father.) Hampstead, Oct. 24 [1861]. (Seven years this very day since I began “the fight” for the Army.) I think Dicey's Cavour and Monckton Milnes's Tocqueville in the Quarterly, the two most masterly sketches of a true Statesman I have read for some time.[358] Cavour's death was heroic—in the prime of his glory and success—working to the last. But I am not sure that there is not something more heroic and more pathetic in Tocqueville's, broken-hearted, but not in despair, faithful to the end of the “good fight”—lost, although fought so well. People call him narrow—i.e. people who are so wide that they can do nothing themselves. The unheroic tone of the teachers of the present day is bad; as when excellent Jowett says that in these days, only “exceptional” cases can fight the good fight. Is not this the reason why these cases are exceptional? And was there ever an age in so much need of heroism?

Most just is the praise to Tocqueville of imitating God in his statesmanship—in reconciling Man's Free Will and God's Law—the only mode in which God or statesman can govern. But he is unfair to himself when he says he will not “play the part of Providence.” He did, as far as he could. He is untrue to himself in saying how little we can ever find out of the Laws of History. Undoubtedly we have as yet found out hardly anything. (I suppose Buckle has some of the crudest generalizations extant.) But, did we study history as much as physical science, would this be so? Is it not like the children who say, I'm too little (when told to do a difficult sum), to attribute this to the “inability of our reason.” Surely God says just the contrary. Tocqueville tells us not to call events “mysterious.” He calls upon governments to comprehend the mysterious influences—“mysterious” only to our ignorance. And I would drop the word altogether. Perhaps Tocqueville was the first statesman who united an acknowledgment of the fact that, according to the laws of God, all human history could not have been other than it has been, with the conviction that this, instead of stimulating us to do nothing, stimulates us to do everything.

Above all, her religious belief satisfied her as giving high motive to human conduct. It linked, in logical connection, the service of man to the service of God. It inspired with religious enthusiasm her conviction that each individual—woman as well as man—should be given the freedom to make the best of himself. The doing of God's will—that is, according to her philosophy, the discovery of causes and effects, the rectification of errors, the education of men to profit by their mistakes—was the way to communion with God. The reader may remember from previous chapters that Florence Nightingale was conscious of “a call from God to be a saviour,” and that the tribute which she paid to her “dear Master,” Sidney Herbert, was to call him “a saver.” There are passages in the Suggestions for Thought which show with what significance she used those terms. “God's plan is that we should make mistakes, that the consequences should be definite and invariable; then comes some Saviour, Christ or another, not one Saviour, but many an one, who learns for all the world by the consequences of those errors, and ‘saves’ us from them.… There must be saviours from social, from moral, error. Most people have not learnt any lesson from life at all—suffer as they may, they learn nothing, they would alter nothing.… We sometimes hear of men ‘having given a colour to their age.’ Now, if the colour is a right colour, those men are saviours.” Miss Nightingale's own work in the world—at Scutari, for the health of the British soldier at home, for Hospitals, for Nursing, and presently for India—received from her philosophy a religious sanction.[359]

V

How, if at all, it may be asked, did she adjust her innermost beliefs to the current creeds of the day? I shall not attempt to define what she did not define; but a few remarks may be made. Was she Unitarian or Trinitarian? I think that we may answer as we will. She was “very sure of God,” but very chary, as we have seen, of attempting to define His essence. Sometimes she seemed to think of God in a Unitarian sense; but there is a passage in the Suggestions in which she philosophizes the Trinity. “The Perfect exists in three relations to other existence: (1) As the Creator of all other existence, of its purpose, and of the means of fulfilling its purpose. This is the Father. (2) As partaken in these other modes of existence. This is the Son. (3) As manifested to these other modes of existence. This is the Holy Ghost.” Then, again, was she “Protestant” or “Catholic”? She used language at different times which might be interpreted in either direction; but she used it at all times with some inner meaning of her own. Here is a letter which philosophizes an “evangelical” doctrine:—

(Miss Nightingale to her Father.) Hampstead, Sept. 26 [1863]. Dear Papa—I am sure that if any one finds nourishment in Renan or in any book I should be very sorry to “depreciate” it. There is not so much solid food in books nowadays, especially in religious books, that we can afford to do so. I always think of Mad. Mohl's, “I don't want any book-writer to chew my food for me.” Now nearly all books are chewed food—especially religious books.… What I dislike in Renan is not that it is fine writing, but that it is all fine writing. His Christ is the hero of a novel; he himself, a successful novel-writer. I am revolted by such expressions as charmant, délicieux, religion du pur sentiment, in such a subject.… As for the “religion of sentiment,” I really don't know what he means. It is an expression of Balzac's. If he means the “religion of love,” I agree and do not agree. We must love something loveable. And a religion of love must certainly include the explaining of God's character to be something loveable—of God's “providence,” which is the self-same thing as God's Laws, as something loving and loveable. On the other hand I go along with Christ, not with Renan's Christ, far more than most Christians do. I do think that “Christ on the Cross” is the highest expression hitherto of God—not in the vulgar meaning of the Atonement—but God does hang on the Cross every day in every one of us; the whole meaning of God's “providence,” i.e. His laws, is the Cross. When Christ preaches the Cross, when all mystical theology preaches the Cross, I go along with them entirely. It is the self-same thing as what I mean when I say that God educates the world by His laws, i.e. by sin—that man must create mankind—that all this evil, i.e. the Cross, is the proof of God's goodness, is the only way by which[487] God could work out man's salvation without a contradiction. You say, but there is too much evil. I say, there is just enough (not a millionth part of a grain more than is necessary) to teach man by his own mistakes,—by his sins, if you will—to show man the way to perfection in eternity—to perfection which is the only happiness.…

There were many points, on the other hand, at which Roman Catholicism strongly appealed to her. So marked is this attitude in the Suggestions—in passages sometimes ironical, sometimes serious—that at one of the latter places Mr. Jowett's note in the margin is: “The enemy will say, This book is written by an Infidel who has been a Papist. But I wish that there were more of these sort of reflections showing the true relation of superstitious ideas to moral and spiritual religion.” I can well believe that her friend Cardinal Manning, for whom she entertained a high respect (though she waged a battle-royal against him on occasion[360]), may sometimes have regarded her as a likely convert; but towards acceptance of Roman doctrines, I find no ground for thinking that she was at any time inclined. Yet the spirit of Catholic saintliness—and especially that of the saints whose contemplative piety was joined to active benevolence—appealed strongly to her. She read books of Catholic devotion constantly, and made innumerable annotations in them and from them. She was greatly attracted by the writings of the Port Royalists, on which subject there is a long correspondence with her father. She admired intensely the aid which Catholic piety had given, and was to many of her own friends giving—to the Bermondsey Nuns, especially, and to the Mother and Sisters of the Trinità de' Monti—towards purity of heart and the doing of everything from a right motive. Then, again, to be “business-like” was with Miss Nightingale almost the highest commendation; and in this character also the Roman Church appealed to her. Its acceptance of doctrines in all their logical conclusions seemed to her business-like; its organization was business-like; its recognition of women-workers was business-like.

So, then, Miss Nightingale was broad-minded in her attitude towards creeds and churches. For her own part she believed that religious truth was positive, and could be discovered; but in her outlook upon the beliefs of others, she judged them by their fruits. She asked not so much what was a man's or a woman's religious formula, but whether it renewed a right spirit within them. With religiosity, if it was centred on self, she had no sympathy. “Is there anything higher,” she asked, “in thinking of one's own salvation than in thinking of one's own dinner? I have always felt that the soldier who gives his life for something which is certainly not himself or his shilling a day—whether he call it his Queen or his Country or his Colours—is higher in the scale than the Saints or the Faquirs or the Evangelicals who (some of them don't) believe that the end of religion is to secure one's own salvation.” Within the limits indicated by these remarks, she would have agreed a good deal with what Mrs. Carlyle said to John Sterling: “I confess that I care almost nothing about what a man believes in comparison with how he believes. If his belief be correct, it is much the better for himself; but its intensity, its efficacy, is the ground on which I love and trust him.”[361]

VI

There is a school of philosophy, much current in our day, which carries this point of view further. The meaning of a conception, it tells us, expresses itself in practical consequences, if the conception be true; religious truth is relative to the individual; the way to test a religion is to live it. If the philosophy of the pragmatists be right, then few forms of religious creed can claim better witness to their truth than that wherein Florence Nightingale lived and moved and had her being. She had “remodelled her whole religious belief from beginning to end,” and had “learnt to know God” in the years immediately preceding her active work in the world. Her belief helped to sustain her natural courage amidst the horrors of Scutari, and the fever and the cold of Balaclava. It inspired the life of arduous labour to which she devoted herself on returning from the East. It informed her unceasing efforts for the health of the Army and the people, for the reformation of hospitals, for the creation of an art of nursing. Does some one, echoing the words of M. Mohl which I have quoted above, doubt whether any vital force can have proceeded from a belief in Law as the Thought of God, and suggest that to herself as to others she was offering a stone instead of bread? It was not so. To her the religion which she found was as the body and blood of the Most High. It is impossible to doubt the spiritual intensity, the religious fervour, of passages such as these from the pages in Suggestions for Thought in which she describes “Communion with God”:—