Embley, Feb. 7 [1851].… I suppose you know how the two churches have been convulsing themselves in England in a manner discreditable to themselves and ridiculous to others. The Anglican Ch. screamed and struggled as if they were taking away something of hers, the Catholic Ch. sang and shouted as if she had conquered England—neither the one nor the other has happened. Only a good many people (in our Church) found out they were Catholics and went to Rome, and a good many other people found out they were Protestants, which they never knew before, and left the Puseyite pen, which has now lost half its sheep. At Oxford the Puseyite volcano is extinct.… You know what a row there will be this Session in Parliament about it. The most moderate wish for a Concordat, but even these say that we must strip the R.C. Bishops of their new titles. Many think the present Gov. will go out upon it, because they won't do enough to satisfy the awakened prejudices of dear John Bull. I used to think it was a mere selfish quarrel between red stockings and lawn sleeves; but not a bit of it; it's a real popular feeling. One would think that all our religion was political by the way we talk, and so I believe it is. From the rising of the sun until the going down of the same, you hear our clergy talking of nothing but Bishops versus Vicars General—never a word of different plans of education, prisons, penitentiaries, and so on. One would think we were born ready made as to education, but that Art made a Church.
I feel little zeal in pulling down one Church or building up another, in making Bishops or unmaking them. If they would make us, our Faith would spring up of itself, and then we shouldn't want either Anglican Ch. or R.C. Church to make it for us. But, bless my soul, people are just as ignorant now of any law in the human mind as they were in Socrates' time. We have learnt the physical laws since then; but mental laws—why, people don't even acknowledge their existence. They talk of grace and divine influence,—why, if it's an arbitrary gift from God, how unkind of Him not to give it before! And if it comes by certain laws, why don't we find them out? But people in England think it quite profane to talk of finding them out, and they pray “That it may please Thee to have mercy upon all men,” when I should knock you down if you were to say to me “That it should please you to have mercy upon your boy.” I never had any training; and training to be called “training,” (as we train the fingers to play[57] scales and shakes)—I doubt whether anybody ever gets from other people, because they don't know how to give it according to any certain laws. I wish everybody would write as far as they can A Short Account of God's Dealings with them, like the old Puritans, and then perhaps we should find out at last what are God's ways in His goings on and what are not.
Arthur Stanley (afterwards the Dean) once asked her to use her influence in preventing a friend of his and of hers from taking the step, supposed to be imminent, of joining the Roman Communion. In a long reply which Miss Nightingale wrote with great care (Nov. 26, 1852), she promised to do what she could, but explained that this might not be much. She herself remained in the Anglican Communion “because she was born there,” and because the Roman Church offered some things which she personally did not want. She feared their friend might consider that such arguments as she could urge against the Roman Church applied equally against the Anglican. And, on the other hand, she had never concealed her opinion that the Roman Communion offered advantages to women which the Church of England (at that time) did not. “The Catholic orders,” she wrote, “offered me work, training for that work, sympathy and help in it, such as I had in vain sought in the Church of England. The Church of England has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics, and a little work (good men make a great deal for themselves). For women she has—what? I had no taste for theological discoveries. I would have given her my head, my heart, my hand. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother's drawing-room; or, if I were tired of that, to marry and look well at the head of my husband's table. You may go to the Sunday School, if you like it, she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it.”
The latter part of the second letter to Miss Clarke shows Miss Nightingale's interest in speculations about the basis of moral law; but so far as the rivalry of Churches was concerned, it was by works that she tried them. “In all the dens of disgrace and disease,” she wrote in one of her note-books (1849), “the only clergy who deserve the name of pastors are the Roman Catholic. The rest, of all denominations—Church of England, Church of Scotland, Dissenters—are only theology or tea mongers.” “It will never do,” she once said to a friend, “unless we have a Church of which the terms of membership shall be works, not doctrines.”[33]
She was interested, however, in doctrines also. If she was resolved to dedicate her life to the Service of Man, she was no less convinced that such service could only be rendered, at the best and highest, in the light, and with the sanction, of Service to God. Herein may be found an underlying unity and harmony through the many and diverse interests of her life. We shall see that she who opened new careers and standards of practical benevolence in the modern world, spent also years of thought upon the less manageable task, if not of providing the world with a new religion, at any rate of giving to old doctrines a new application, and, as she hoped, a more acceptable sanction.
CHAPTER IV
DISAPPOINTMENT
(1846–1847)
There are Private Martyrs as well as burnt or drowned ones. Society of course does not know them; and Family cannot, because our position to one another in our families is, and must be, like that of the Moon to the Earth. The Moon revolves round her, moves with her, never leaves her. Yet the Earth never sees but one side of her; the other side remains for ever unknown.—Florence Nightingale (in a Note-book of 1847–49).
A poet of our time has counted “Disappointment's dry and bitter root” among the ingredients of “the right mother-milk to the tough hearts that pioneer their kind.” If it indeed be so, Florence Nightingale was well nurtured. The spiritual experiences and speculations, recorded in the last chapter, worked round to a justification, as we have seen, of her chosen plan of life. Religion thus brought no consolation for the failure of her scheme to escape in December 1845. “My misery and vacuity afterwards,” she wrote in an autobiographical retrospect, “were indescribable.” “All my plans have been wrecked,” she wrote at the time, “and my hopes destroyed, and yet without any visible, any material change.” She faced the new year and its life on the old lines in a mood of depression which, with some happier intervals, was to grow deeper and more intense during the next few years.