Though trained in the best schools of Protestant benevolence, Miss Jones’ shrinking from association with the nurses even of Miss Nightingale’s school—not unreasonable when we recall the experience of the latter in the Crimea—and her observations with regard to the difficulties of such institutions, are full of significance to those familiar with the efficient charitable organizations in the church. She says: “The difficulty [of having deaconesses in England] is, the real submission of the will there must be. I believe this is the valuable part of the training.” “I believe all I owe to Kaiserswerth was comprised in the lesson of unquestioning obedience.” “No one can tell what a woman exposes herself to who acts independently. I never would advise any one to do as I have done, and yet I feel I have been led on step by step, almost unwillingly, certainly not as I should have chosen, had I not seemed guided, as I believe I have been, and so kept.” “But what I feel so much is, how many there are who want some place where they can get teachings for their own hearts and souls, training for, and direction in, work for others, sympathy in that work and their difficulties in it, and a home where, in their leisure hours, they may have more or less association with others.”
And the estimable Miss Nightingale, in her introduction, says: “There is no such thing as amateur nursing.... Three-fourths of the whole mischief in women’s lives arises from excepting themselves from the rule of training considered needful for man.”
To these quotations, we will add another statement in this book by the Rev. Mr. Moody, likewise of the Evangelical school, who is told at Kaiserswerth that the Evangelicals of Great Britain furnished less useful sick-nurses than the churches tinged with ritualism. This, he says, was “humbling and instructive to hear”; and he adds this was because “the nurses that come from us [the Evangelicals] are more anxious to take charge and to administer medicines, than to obey, to learn, to serve.”
Such statements make us turn with satisfaction to the noble army of charity in the Catholic Church who really give up home and earthly pleasures and their own will, and make themselves poor with the poor, counting all this no loss that they may be spent for Christ’s poor ones. What they have achieved as a whole is partly known, but individual sacrifices and efforts are buried in the hidden life they love. Their veiled lives are only fully known to the Divine Spouse, whom they tenderly take to their hearts in the person of his suffering poor; their countless heroic souls mostly pass away leaving no written record on earth.
The garments of the church are all studded over with such precious jewels of love and charity. We have no reason to envy those who seek to imitate our Sisters of Charity like the deaconesses of Kaiserswerth and Florence Nightingale. May their laudable examples and that of Miss Jones find numerous emulators! The glimpses this book gives us of the moral as well as physical degradation of some of the Liverpool paupers, are enough to set the Christian heart on fire to labor for the elevation of the human race. Those women who talk so frantically of their rights and of woman’s mission can here find their true field, where none can compete with them. Men certainly cannot.
But, as Rahel Varnhagen says: “Those who completely sacrifice themselves are praised and admired: that is the sort of character men like to find in others.”
Six Weeks Abroad. By the Rev. G. F. Haskins. Boston: P. Donahoe.
The genial F. Haskins is known to everybody, and this little book presents his numerous friends with a portrait of him, a short biographical sketch, and some very brief, characteristic, and sparkling notes of a recent visit to Europe. Each chapter is a little crystal of Attic salt. Whoever buys and reads this book will be pleased with it, be he young or old. There are some remarks on education, Irish and American politics, etc., which are as remarkable for point and sense as they are for terseness. Father Haskins’ coin is small but valuable, like a rouleau of gold dollars.