It may seem a strange thing to begin a book with:—this Book is not for any one who has time to read it—but the meaning of it is: this reading is good only as a preparation for work. If it is not to inspire life and work, it is bad. Just as the end of food is to enable us to live and work, and not to live and eat, so the end of—most reading perhaps, but certainly of—mystical reading is not to read but to work.

For what is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for “The Kingdom of Heaven is within”? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But “thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is”: this may be here and now, as well as there and then. And it may be for a time—then lost—then recovered—both here and there, both now and then.

That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics—as is more particularly set forth in a definition of the 16th century: “True religion is to have no other will but God's.” Compare this with the definition of Religion in Johnson's Dictionary: “Virtue founded upon reverence of God and expectation of future rewards and punishments”; in other words on respect and self-interest, not love. Imagine the religion which inspired the life of Christ “founded” on the motives given by Dr. Johnson!

Christ Himself was the first true Mystic. “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work.” What is this but putting in fervent and the most striking words the foundation of all real Mystical Religion?—which is that for all our actions, all our words, all our thoughts, the food upon which they are to live and have their being is to be the indwelling Presence of God, the union with God; that is, with the Spirit of Goodness and Wisdom.

Where shall I find God? In myself. That is the true Mystical Doctrine. But then I myself must be in a state for Him to come and dwell in me. This is the whole aim of the Mystical Life; and all Mystical Rules in all times and countries have been laid down for putting the soul into such a state.[234] That the soul herself should be heaven, that our Father which is in heaven should dwell in her, that there is something within us infinitely more estimable than often comes out, that God enlarges this “palace of our soul” by degrees so as to enable her to receive Himself, that thus he gives her liberty but that the soul must give herself up absolutely to Him for Him to do this, the incalculable benefit of this occasional but frequent intercourse with the Perfect: this is the conclusion and sum of the whole matter, put into beautiful language by the Mystics. And of this process they describe the steps, and assign periods of months and years during which the steps, they say, are commonly made by those who make them at all.

These old Mystics whom we call superstitious were far before us in their ideas of God and of prayer (that is of our communion with God). “Prayer,” says a mystic of the 16th century, “is to ask not what we wish of God, but what God wishes of us.” “Master who hast made and formed the vessel of the body of Thy creature, and hast put within so great a treasure, the Soul, which bears the image of Thee”: so begins a dying prayer of the 14th century. In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition. There is never a word of the theory that God's dealings with us are to show His “power”; still less of the theory that “of His own good pleasure” He has “predestined” any souls to eternal damnation. There is little mention of heaven for self; of desire of happiness for self, none. It is singular how little mention there is either of “intercession” or of “Atonement by Another's merits.” True it is that we can only create a heaven for ourselves and others “by the merits of Another,” since it is only by working in accordance with God's Laws that we can do anything. But there is nothing at all in these prayers as if God's anger had to be bought off, as if He had to be bribed into giving us heaven by sufferings merely “to satisfy God's justice.” In the dying prayers, there is nothing of the “egotism of death.” It is the reformation of God's church—that is, God's children, for whom the self would give itself, that occupies the dying thoughts. There is not often a desire to be released from trouble and suffering. On the contrary, there is often a desire to suffer the greatest suffering, and to offer the greatest offering, with even greater pain, if so any work can be done. And still, this, and all, is ascribed to God's goodness. The offering is not to buy anything by suffering, but—If only the suppliant can do anything for God's children!

These suppliants did not live to see the “reformation” of God's children. No more will any who now offer these prayers. But at least we can all work towards such practical “reformation.”[235] The way to live with God is to live with Ideas—not merely to think about ideals, but to do and suffer for them. Those who have to work on men and women must above all things have their Spiritual Ideal, their purpose, ever present. The “mystical” state is the essence of common sense.

The authors whom Miss Nightingale read for the purpose of her selection included St. Angela of Foligno, Madame de Chatel, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Francis Xavier, St. John of the Cross, Peter of Alcantara, Father Rigoleuc, St. Teresa, and Father Surin. She arranged her extracts from these and other writers under headings, and supplied marginal summaries. She prepared also a title-page:—Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen, and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale.

III

This and all other literary work was interrupted, however, at the beginning of 1874 by the death of her father. She was in London; her sister and Sir Harry Verney were with him and Mrs. Nightingale at Embley. He was 80; but, though his strength of body and mind had failed a little, he had been out for his usual ride a few days before. Lady Verney had wished him good-night. “Say not good-night,” he said in reply, quoting Mrs. Barbauld, “but in some brighter clime Bid me good-morning.” A day or two later, he came down to breakfast as usual, but found that he had forgotten his watch. He went to fetch it, slipped upon the stairs, and died on the spot. Miss Nightingale felt the loss of her father deeply. “His reverent love for you,” wrote Lord Houghton in a letter of condolence (Jan. 13, 1874), “was inexpressibly touching,” and her love for him, though of a different kind, was very tender. Unlike in many respects, father and daughter were yet kindred spirits in intellectual curiosity, in a taste for speculative inquiry. M. Mohl noted among Mr. Nightingale's engaging characteristics “a modest curiosity about everything, a surprised, innocent, incredulous smile as he listened intently.” Miss Irby spoke of his “exceeding sweetness and childlikeness of wisdom.” These qualities were conspicuous in much of his intercourse with his daughter Florence, and she was now deprived of the father who had, in things of the mind, sat at her feet and sympathized in her searches after truth. The death of her father was quickly followed, on January 31, 1874, by that of her dearly loved friend, Mrs. Bracebridge. “She was more than mother to me,” wrote Florence to M. and Madame Mohl (Feb. 3); “and oh that I could not be a daughter to her in her last sad days! What should I have been without her? and what would many have been without her? To one living with her as I did once, she was unlike any other human being: as unlike as a picture of a sunny scene is to the real light and warmth of sunshine: or as this February lamp we call our sun is to her own Sun of living light in Greece.… Other people live together to make each other worse: she lived with all to make them better. And she was not like a chastened Christian saint: no more like that than Apollo; but she had qualities which no Greek God ever had—real humility (excepting my dear Father, I never knew any one so really humble), and with it the most active heart and mind and buoyant soul that could well be conceived.” Mr. Bracebridge had died eighteen months before (July 18, 1872), and Miss Nightingale had said: “He and she have been the creators of my life. And when I think of him at Scutari, the only man in all England who would have lived with willingness such a pigging life, without the interest and responsibility which it had to me, I think that we shall never look upon his like again. And when I think of Atherstone, of Athens, of all the places I have been in with them, of the immense influence they had in shaping my own life—more than earthly father and mother to me—I cannot doubt that they leave behind them, having shaped many lives as they did mine, their mark on the century—this century which has so little ideal at least in England. They were so immeasurably above any English ‘country gentry’ I have ever known.” Miss Nightingale's estimate of her friends was shared by others who had enjoyed their hospitality. “The death of Mrs. Bracebridge,” wrote M. Mohl (Feb. 14), “is a sad blow for you. The breaking of these old associations which nothing new can replace impoverishes one's life, and a part of ourselves dies out with old friends even if they have not been to us what Mrs. Bracebridge was to you. Und immer stiller wird's und stiller auf unserm Pfad until the great problem of life opens for ourselves. Two better people than the Bracebridges, different as they were, I have never seen. Madame d'Abbadie has a queer expression for a woman she approves of; she says elle est honnête homme, and nothing is more appropriate to Mrs. Bracebridge. I can never think of Atherstone without emotion; it is people like these in whom lies the glory of England and the strength of the country. They were so genuine, so ready to help and to impoverish themselves for public purposes, and to do it unostentatiously and without fishing for popularity.” To the end of her life Miss Nightingale cherished the memory of these faithful and helpful friends. “To my beloved and revered friends,” she said in her Will, “Mr. Charles Bracebridge and his wife, my more than mother, without whom Scutari and my life could not have been, and to whom nothing that I could ever say or do would in the least express my thankfulness, I should have left some token of my remembrance had they, as I expected, survived me.” The death of her companion at Scutari removed one of the few links with Miss Nightingale's happier past. The death of her father was not only a bereavement which she felt deeply; it also involved her in much distracting business. Her father's landed properties, at Embley and Lea Hurst, now passed, under the entail, to his sister, “Aunt Mai,” and her husband. Florence did not attend her father's funeral, but soon she went down to Embley to look after her mother. There, and afterwards in London, she was immersed in worrying affairs. Her only comfort, she wrote repeatedly in private notes, was the “goodness” of Mr. Shore Smith—“her boy” of old days. The letters of Mr. Coltman, one of her father's executors, were full of humour, but Florence was never able to take things lightly. There were questions of property and residence to be discussed; servants to be dismissed and engaged; her mother's immediate movements and future mode of life to be settled. Everybody had a different plan, and Florence complained that nobody but she had the same plan for two days running. Her letters and notes at this period are of a quite tragic intensity. Something may be ascribed to a characteristic over-emphasis. “We Smiths,” she said once of herself, “all exaggerate”; and Mr. Jowett said of some remarks made by her about him: “You are as nearly right as an habitual spirit of exaggeration will ever allow you to be.” “We are a great many too many strong characters,” she wrote of herself and her family, “and very different: all pulling different ways. And we are so dreadfully au sérieux. Oh, how much good it does us to have some one to laugh at us!”