(a) Matters of universal importance, moral and spiritual (e.g. the finest parts of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the New Testament); (b) matters of historical importance (e.g. which embrace the history of great nations, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon. The petty wars of the petty tribes seem to take up a quite disproportionate space); (c) matters of local importance, which have acquired a universal moral significance (e.g. Jonah is entirely left out: yet Jonah has a moral and spiritual meaning, while Samson, Balaam and Bathsheba have none); (d) matters of merely local importance, with no significance but an immoral one (e.g. the stories about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, almost all Joshua and Judges, and very much of Samuel and Kings). The story of Achilles and his horses is far more fit for children than that of Balaam and his ass, which is only fit to be told to asses. The stories of Samson and of Jephthah are only fit to be told to bull-dogs; and the story of Bathsheba, to be told to Bathshebas. Yet we give all these stories to children as “Holy Writ.” There are some things in Homer we might better call “Holy” Writ—many, many in Sophocles and Aeschylus. The stories about Andromache and Antigone are worth all the women in the Old Testament put together; nay, almost all the women in the Bible.
“I have just finished the Children's Bible,” wrote Mr. Jowett (Feb. 10, 1872). “I blessed you every time I took the papers up, especially in the Prophets. I have adopted your selection almost entirely, with a slight abridgement, and it is further approved by Mr. Cheyne's authority.”
These various literary enterprises, undertaken at Mr. Jowett's instance, occupied a great deal of Miss Nightingale's time—more time, as she sometimes said to herself, than could rightly be spared from primary duties; and the time was spent, she added in her self-reproaches, to little purpose. In some respects Mr. Jowett's suggestions to her were not very happy. One cannot elaborate in a consecutive form a Scheme of Theology or a Social Philosophy, even through the medium of essays, in odd hours as a bye-work. So Miss Nightingale soon found, and the failure weighed heavily on her spirits; but Mr. Jowett did not realize how great was the strain upon his friend's faculties involved in her nursing work, nor how much time, effort, and emotion she was devoting, though “out of office,” to the complicated problems of Indian administration. We, who have access to her Papers, shall learn the full extent of these preoccupations in later chapters (III. and IV.). But something must first be said of another literary enterprise. To it Miss Nightingale's close study of the Bible and of Plato was entirely relevant. Such studies were, as we shall find in the next chapter, part of the food which sustained her inner life.
CHAPTER II
THE MYSTICAL WAY
Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God—to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light.—Florence Nightingale.
It has been mentioned incidentally in an earlier chapter that Miss Nightingale was fond of reading the books of Catholic devotion which the Reverend Mother of the Bermondsey Convent used to send her. Long before, she had studied carefully the writings of the Port Royalists; and at the Trinità de' Monti she had seen the ideal of Catholic devotion in real life. She used to pass on some of her devotional works to Mr. Jowett. He began with St. Teresa, and, at first repelled, he gradually became interested. Miss Nightingale was in the habit of copying out passages for her own edification, sometimes in the original, sometimes translating them. The idea of making a selection for publication occurred to her, and Mr. Jowett encouraged it. “Do not give up your idea,” he said, “of making a selection of the better mind of the Middle Ages and the Mystics.” “You will do a good work,” he wrote again (Oct. 3, 1872), “if you point out the kind of mysticism which is needed in the present day—not mysticism at all, but as intense a feeling, as the mystics had, of the power of truth and reason and of the will of God that they should take effect in the world. The passion of the reason, the fusion of faith and reason, the reason in religion and the religion in reason—if you can only describe these, you will teach people a new lesson. The new has something still to learn from the old; and I am not certain whether we ought not to retire into mysticism (I thought I should not use the word) when the antagonism with existing opinions becomes too great.” Miss Nightingale's close study of Plato and of the Bible, described in the last chapter, increased her interest in Christian mysticism. The Fourth Gospel was the work of a mystic. And there were curious analogies, which she pointed out to Mr. Jowett,[145] between Plato and the mediæval mystics. The famous myth of the purified soul, for instance, recalled a passage in the Fioretti of St. Francis, except that there the purgatorial stage, before the “wings grow,” lasts 150 years, instead of 10,000. Miss Nightingale said of the closing prayer in the Phaedrus—“Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and inward man be at one”—a prayer unequalled, she thought, by any Collect in the service-book—that it “put in seventeen words the whole, or at least half, of the doctrine of St. John of the Cross.” Plato made her the more interested in the Christian Mystics; the Christian Mystics, the more interested in Plato. Concurrently with her work for Mr. Jowett's revised Plato she gave much time during 1873 and 1874 (with additions in later years) to transcribing or translating and arranging passages from devotional writers of the Middle Ages. She had sent some of her book in various stages to Mr. Jowett, who, with other suggestions, said (April 18, 1873) that she ought to add “a Preface showing the use of such books. They are apt to appear unreal, and yet Thomas à Kempis has been one of the most influential books in the world. The subject of the Preface should be the use of the ideal and especially the spiritual ideal. I do not say what may be the case with great Saints themselves, but for us I think it is clear that this mystic state ought to be an occasional and not a permanent feeling—a taste of heaven in daily life. Do you think it would be possible to write a mystical book which would also be the essence of Common Sense?”
II
I construct the Preface from various notes and rough drafts in Miss Nightingale's hand:—