Chapter III: The Spiritual Life

Though the outward man may perish, yet the inward man is renewed
day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment,
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;
while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things
which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but
the things which are not seen are eternal.--ST. PAUL.

The failure of her plan left Florence in a state of great dejection. "The day of personal hopes and fears," she wrote, "is over for me. Now I dread and desire no more." This was but a passing mood; and very soon, as we shall hear in the next chapter, she resumed, with increased determination, her struggle for freedom and self-expression in a life of action. But for the moment, and at many recurring moments in later years, the dejection was intense. It was not merely the disappointment of an eager mind denied its appropriate energy; it was the exceeding bitter cry of an intensely religious soul, tempted in its perplexity to ask, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"

In some autobiographical notes Miss Nightingale recorded under the year 1843 "an illness and an acquaintance I made with a woman to whom all unseen things seemed real, and eternal things near, awakened me" [from dreaming]. The woman to whom she referred was, it may safely be conjectured, Miss Hannah Nicholson. They met once or twice a year--when Miss Nicholson visited Embley or Miss Nightingale stayed with Miss Nicholson's brother at Waverley. At other times they exchanged a voluminous correspondence, and this was almost entirely devoted to religious experiences and speculations. "Aunt Hannah" had inexhaustible sympathy with her self-torturing young friend. She did not chide or discourage Florence; but the burden of her message was the claim of the spiritual life, the message of Paul to the Corinthians. "Your whole life," wrote Florence in one of many bursts of affectionate gratitude to Miss Nicholson, "seems to be love, and you always find words in your heart which, without the pretension of enlightening, yet are like a clearing up to me. You always seem to rest on the heart of the divine Teacher, and to participate in His mysteries." "Your letters," she said on another occasion, "stay by me and warm me when the dreams of life come one after another, clouding and covering the realities of the unseen." To this sympathetic and (in some limited respects) kindred soul, Florence poured out unreservedly the experiences of her spiritual life; as also, sometimes, though with more conscious art of literary expression, to Miss Clarke in Paris.

II

A few letters, selected from a great number, will serve to trace the course of her religious thoughts. They resumed, it will be seen, the spiritual experiences and convictions of the saints who have served mankind. The _Reality of the Unseen World_ is the subject of a letter to Miss Clarke (August 1846), in which, after a page of family news, she continues:--

But I think you must be tired of all this, for I fancy that you
live much more in the supernatural than the natural world. I always
believe in Homer; and in St. Paul's "cloud of witnesses"; and in
the old Italian pictures, which have a first story, where the
Unseen live _au premier_, with a two-pair back, where the Père
Eternel's shadow is half seen peeping out, and a ground floor where
poor mortals live, but still have a connexion with the
establishment above stairs. I like those books, where the Invisible
communicates freely with the Visible Kingdom; not that they ever
come up to one's idea, which is always so much brighter than the
execution (for the word is only the shadow cast by the light of the
thought); but they are suggestive. I always believe in a multitude
of spirits inhabiting the same house with ourselves; we are only
the entresol, quite the most insignificant of its lodgers, and too
busy with our pursuit of daily bread, too much confined with hard
work, and too full of the struggle with the material world, to
visit the glorious beings immediately about us--whom we shall see,
when the present candle of our earthly reason is put out, which
blinds us just as the candle end, left burning after one is in bed,
long prevents us from seeing the world without, lit up by the full
moon. It trembles and flickers and sinks into its socket, and then
we catch a bright stripe of moonlight shining on the floor; but it
flares up again, and the silvery stream is gone "as if it could not
be, as if it had not been," and we can see nothing but the candle,
and hardly imagine any other light--till at last it goes quite out,
and the flood of moonlight rushes into the room, and every pane of
the casement window, and every ivy leaf without, are stamped, as it
were, upon the floor, and a whole world revealed to us, which that
flickering candle was the means of concealing from us. This is what
Jesus Christ meant, I suppose, when He said that He must go away in
order to be _with_ His friends in His spirit, that He would be much
nearer to them after death than in the flesh. In the flesh, we were
separated from our friends by their going into the next room
only--a door, a partition divided us; but what can separate two
souls? Often I fancy that we can perceive the presence of a good
spirit communicating thoughts to us: are they not all ministering
spirits, sent forth to minister unto us? When Jesus Christ warns us
not to despise any one, because that in Heaven their angels do
always behold the face of His Father, perhaps He thought that our
beloved ones, who are gone, might be these our "angels," who must
therefore have communion with men.

It is here, where a cold and false life of conventionalism and
prejudices and frivolity is often all that reaches our outward
senses, that we are sometimes baffled in seeing into the life which
lies beneath; it is here, amidst the tempers and little vexations,
which are the shadows that dim the brightest intercourse, it is
here that we fail sometimes in having intimate communion with
souls, and we stop short at the dead coverings; but between the
soul which is free, and our soul, what barrier, what restraint can
there be? Human sympathy is indeed necessary to our happiness of
every moment, and the absence of it makes an awful void in our
life. Every room becomes a grave, and every book we used to read
together a monument to the one we love. But some one says, that we
need an _idée merveilleuse_ to preserve us from the busy devils,
which imagination here is always conjuring up. This _idée
merveilleuse_, I think, is the idea of the loving presence of
spirits. Those dear ones are safe, and yet with us still, for truly
do I believe that these senses of ours are what veil from us, not
discover to us, the world around (which is sometimes revealed to
us in dreams, or in moments of excitement, as at the point of
death, either our own or a friend's, or by mesmerism, or by faith).
Faith is the real eye and ear of the soul, and as it would be
impossible to describe the harmony and melody of Music to one who
was born deaf, or to make a blind man perceive the beauty of the
effects of colour, so without faith the spiritual world is as much
a hidden one to the soul as the Art of Painting to the blind man.
On a dark night the moon, when at last she rises, reveals to us,
just at our feet, a world of objects, of the presence of which we
were not aware before. We see the river sparkling in the moonbeams
close beside us, and the tall shadows sleeping quietly on the
grass, and the sharp relief of the architectural cornices, and the
strong outline of the lights and shades, so well defined that we
can scarcely believe that a moment ago, and we did not see them.
What shall we say if, one day, the moon rises upon our spiritual
world, and we see close at hand, ready to hold the most intimate
communion with us, those spirits, whom we had loved and mourned as
lost to us? We are like the blind men by the wayside, and ought to
sit and cry, Lord that we may receive our sight! And, when we _do_
receive it, we shall perhaps find that we require no transporting
into another world, to become aware of the immediate presence of an
Infinite Spirit, and of other lesser ones whom we thought gone.
What we require is sight, not change of place, I believe.

The struggle which absorbed Florence's mind and heart was to establish some harmony between her dealings in the world of sense and her communion with the unseen world. She reproached herself for impatience, for selfishness, for lack of confidence in the good time of God. Happy are they who have no more occasion than she to deem themselves unprofitable servants! But the condition of attainment to comparative sinlessness is, I suppose, the _Conviction of Sin_; and this was intensely present to Florence Nightingale. "I have read over your letters many times again and again since I have been here," she wrote from Tapton (her grandmother Shore's house) in 1845. "Ah, my dear Aunt Hannah, you are like the white swan on your cool, fresh, blue lake, rocked to peace and rest by the sweet winds of your faith and love, and you cannot be dragged down into our busy chicken-yard of struggling, _scratting_ life.[30] You do not know what it is, when one has sinned with such aggravation as I have. No one has had such advantages, and I have sinned with all these, and after having been made to know what sin was, and what my obligations were. No one has so grieved the Holy Spirit. I have sinned against my conviction, and, as it were, standing before God's judgment-seat." In many of Miss Nightingale's religious outpourings, both in letters and in private diaries, there is a note which borders on the morbid; but the danger-point is averted, sometimes by practical good sense, and sometimes by a saving sense of humour. The letter, just given, was soon followed by another (from Embley, Oct. 1845), containing this account of a scene at the bedside of her favourite little cousin:--"One night when I was reading to Shore the verse about the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and we were agreeing that the temptations of the flesh were liking a great deal of play and no work, and lying long bed, and the temptations of the world liking to be praised and admired, and be a general favourite, and so on, more than anything else, and we were both very much affected, he said before I left him, 'Now I may lie in bed to-morrow, and you won't call me at six, will you?' And I too went away to dream about a great many things which I had much better not think about. Oh, how I did laugh at the results of all our feelings! To think and to be are two such different things!"

[30] The reader will note the recurrence here of some phrases already
used in another letter. It is an instance of a point there noted
(p. 28).

To bring thought and action into harmony, to make the presence of the Unseen a guide through the path of this present world: that is the problem of the practically religious life. To Florence Nightingale, communion with the Unseen meant something deeper, richer, fuller, more positive than the fear of God. The fear of God is the beginning, but not the end, of wisdom, for perfect love casteth out fear. It was for the love of God as an active principle in her mind, constraining all her deeds, that she strove. When she was conscious of falling away from this grace, she knew _the pains of hell_, here and now, as the state of a soul in estrangement from the Eternal goodness:--

(_To Miss Nicholson._) EMBLEY, _Christmas Eve_ [undated]. Think of
me to-morrow at the Sacrament. I have not taken it since I last
took it with you, except once, with a poor woman on her death-bed.
Time has sped wearily with me since then, Aunt Hannah. If, when the
plough goes over the soul, there were always the hand of the Sower
there to scatter the seed after it, who would regret? But how often
the seed-time has passed, it is too late, the harrow has gone over,
the time of harvest has come and the harvest is not.... Give me
your thoughts to-morrow, my dear Aunt Hannah; I want them sadly;
and take me with you to the Throne of Grace. Bless me too, as poor
Esau said. I have so felt with him, and cried with a great and
exceeding bitter cry, Bless me, even me also, O my Father; but He
never has yet, and I have not deserved that He should.

(_To Miss Nicholson, May 1846._) "The sorrows of hell compassed me
about." We learn to know what these are beforehand, when we cannot
command our thoughts to pray, when all our omissions give
themselves form and life, and shut us up within a wall over which
there is no looking, no return: when they hold us down with a
resistless power, and we are hemmed in with our remembrances, like
a cell compassing us about. What can the future hell be other than
this? The Unspeakable Presence may be joy and peace unspeakable,
but it may be a Horror, a Dweller on our Threshold, a Spirit of
Fear to the stricken conscience. Jesus Christ prayed on the Cross
not for life or safety, but only for the light of His countenance:
Why hast Thou forsaken me? And all sorrows disappear before that
one. Let those who have felt it say if it is not so, and if there
is any sorrow like unto that sorrow. How willingly would we
exchange it for pain, which we almost welcome as a proof of His
care and attention. Grief in itself is no evil; as making the
Unseen, the Eternal, and the Infinite present to our consciousness,
it is rather a good. But when all one's imaginations are wandering
out of one's reach, then one realizes the future state of
punishment even in this world. Pray that He will not leave my soul
in hell. How little can be done under the spirit of fear; it is the
very sentence pronounced upon the serpent, "Upon thy belly shalt
thou go all the days of thy life." Oh, if any one thinks that, in
the repentance of fear, this is the time for the soul to open to
the Infinite goodness, to the spirit of love and of power and of a
sound mind, in the heart's death to live and love,--let him try how
hard it is to collect oneself out of distraction--let him feel the
woes of saying _To-morrow_, when God has said _To-day_; and then
when he has found how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem all
the uses of the world, let him try with a dead heart to live unto
God, to love with all his strength when all energy to love is gone.

The state of perfect love, expressing itself in perfect rightness of thought and deed, may be unattainable on earth, but nothing lower than the search for this ideal can satisfy the yearnings of a soul such as was Florence Nightingale's. She had the _Hunger for Righteousness_. "The crown of _righteousness_!" she wrote to Miss Nicholson (May 1846). "That word always strikes me more than anything in the Bible. Strange that not happiness, not rest, not forgiveness, not glory, should have been the thought of that glorious man's mind, when at the eve of the last and greatest of his labours; all desires so swallowed up in the one great craving after _righteousness_ that, at the end of all his struggles, it was mightier within him than ever, mightier even than the desire of peace. How can people tell one to dwell within a good conscience, when the chief of all the apostles so panted after righteousness that he considered it the last best gift, unattainable on earth, to be bestowed in Heaven?"

To do _All for the Love of God_ was the ideal which she sought to attain. "The foundation of all must be the love of God. That the sufferings of Christ's life were intense, who doubts? but the happiness must also have been intense. Only think of the happiness of working, and working successfully too, and with no doubts as to His path, and with no alloy of vanity or love of display or glory, but with the ecstasy of single-heartedness! All that I do is always poisoned by the fear that I am not doing it in simplicity and godly sincerity." This was one of the constant dreads throughout her life. When she had become famous, and was praised and courted by the popular breath, she shrank, with an abhorrence which some may have considered almost morbid and which was certainly foreign to the fashion of the world, from any avoidable publicity. This was no pose or affectation; it was part of her religion. It was a counsel dictated by her earnest striving to dissociate her work for God from any taint of worldliness.

III

The world which came to owe much to the life and example of Florence Nightingale, owes something to Miss Nicholson, whose gentle sympathy brought to her young friend much strength and peace. But the world may also be glad, I think, that Miss Nightingale's religious thought worked itself out in the end on lines of her own. Florence Nightingale has been enrolled by the popular voice among the saints; but there are saints and saints--saints contemplative or mystic, and saints active and ministering. In all ages of the world there have been godly women whose passion of religious spirit has led them to lives of professional pieties, rather than of practical service; who have spent in ecstasies of pity, or in tortures of self-abasement at the foot of the Cross, powers which might have gone to redeem and save the world. Florence Nightingale had, as we have sufficiently seen, a profound sense of personal religion. She felt, as all the saints must feel, that a religious life means a state of the soul; but she attained also to the conviction, which became ever stronger within her, that a state of the soul can only be approved by its fruits, and that thus _the Service of God is the Service of Man_:--

(_To Miss Nicholson._) EMBLEY, _Sept._ 24, [1846]. I am almost
heart-broken to leave Lea Hurst. There are so many duties there
which lie near at hand, and I could be well content to do them
there all the days of my life. I have left so many poor friends
there whom I shall never see again, and so much might have been
done for them.... I feel my sympathies are with Ignorance and
Poverty. The things which interest me interest them; we are alike
in expecting little from life, much from God; we are taken up with
the same objects.... My imagination is so filled with the misery of
this world that the only thing in which to labour brings any
return, seems to me helping and sympathizing _there_; and all that
poets sing of the glories of this world appears to me untrue: all
the people I see are eaten up with care or poverty or disease. I
know that it was God who created the good, and man the evil, which
was not the will of God, but the necessary consequence of His
leaving free-will to man. I know that misery is the alphabet of
fire, in which history, with its warning hand, writes in flaming
letters the consequences of Evil (the Kingdom of _Man_), and that
without its glaring light, we should never see the path back into
the Kingdom of God, or heed the directing guide-posts. But the
judgments of nature (the law of God), as she goes her mighty,
solemn, inflexible march, sweeps sometimes so fearfully over man
that though it is the triumph, not the defeat of God's truth and of
His laws, that falsehood against them must work misery, and misery
is perhaps _here_ the strongest proof that His loving hand is
present,--yet all our powers, hopes, and fears must, it seems to
me, be engrossed by doing His work for its relief. Life is no
holiday game, nor is it a clever book, nor is it a school of
instruction, nor a valley of tears; but it is a hard fight, a
struggle, a wrestling with the Principle of Evil, hand to hand,
foot to foot. Every inch of the way must be disputed. The night is
given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of
power. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go
forth to work with it till the evening. The Kingdom of God is
coming; and "_Thy Kingdom_ come" does not mean only "_My salvation_
come."

"To find out what we can do," she wrote as an annotation in Browning's _Paracelsus_, "one's individual place, as well as the General End, is man's task. To serve man for God's sake, not man's, will prevent failure from being disappointment." Florence Nightingale sought then to save her soul by serving others.

It was by this same test of practical service that she came to try and to weigh the various forms of religious doctrine. Her father was, as I have said, a Unitarian, and several other members of her family circle were of the same persuasion. But she and some others of that circle conformed in practice to the services of the English Church. And so, in some degree, Miss Nightingale continued to conform to the end of her life; though, as we shall find later on, she departed widely from the doctrines of the Church as ordinarily received, did not care about "going to church," and framed a creed of her own. But she always had a tolerant mind for any faith that issued in good works, and an impatience with any that did not. It is for this reason that she seemed to be all things to all men in religious matters. Her mission to the Crimea involved, as we shall learn, some religious bickerings. Protestants thought her too indulgent to Roman Catholics, and Catholics were sore that she did not go further with them. But her real attitude is perfectly clear, and was entirely consistent. If she looked with a favouring eye on Roman Catholics, it was on account, not of their dogmas, but of their deeds. Two letters to Madame Mohl, ten years apart in date, suggest what was always Miss Nightingale's point of view:--

LEA HURST, _Sept._ [1841]. We are very anxious to hear, dearest
Miss Clarke, how you are going on, and how Mrs. Clarke is, some day
when you are able to write. We are just returned from the Leeds
Consecration, and a more curious or interesting sight I never saw.
Imagine a procession of 400 clergymen, all in their white robes,
with scarfs of blue and black and fur and even scarlet, so that I
thought some of them were cardinals, headed by the Archbishop of
York,[31] the Bishop of Ripon, &c., and most curious of all the
Bishop of _New Jersey_ to whom Dr. Hook (who is,--you know,
perhaps,--the _Puseyite_ vicar of Leeds) had written to ask him to
come over from America, expressly to preach the consecration
sermon. Imagine all this procession, entering the church, repeating
the 24th Ps.--and then filling the space before the altar and the
Transept--and _all_ responding aloud through the service, so that
the roll and echo of their responses through the Transept, without
being able to see _them_, was the most striking thing I ever heard.
It was quite a gathering-place for Puseyites from all parts of
England. Papa heard them debating, whether they should have lighted
candles before the Altar, but they decided no, because the Bishop
of Ripon would not like it--however they had them in the evening
and the next morning when he was gone--and Dr. Hook has the regular
Catholic jerk in making the genuflexion every time he approaches
the altar. The church is a most magnificent one, and every one has
contributed their best to it, with a true Catholic spirit; one gave
the beautiful painted window, another the Correggio for the Altar
piece, the Queen Dowager the Altar-cloth, another the bells, &c.,
&c. Dr. Hook gives a service every morning and evening at 1/2 p. 7,
and the Sacrament every Sunday; and the aisle is all occupied by
_open_ seats. During the consecration I wished to have been a
clergyman, but when Mrs. Gaskell[32] (whom I was with, she is a
good Tory and half a Puseyite and withal the most general favourite
and generally _lenient_ person in England)--when she and I came
down afterwards for the Sacrament, I could not help looking in the
faces of the clergymen, for the impression I expected to see, as
they walked down the aisle, and wandered about, (this immense
crowd) after the Sacrament--and oh! I was woefully
disappointed--they looked so stupid; and I could not help thinking,
If you had been Catholics, you would all have been on your knees
during the service, without minding your fine gowns and the cold
stones.

[31] Edward Vernon Harcourt.

[32] _Née_ Brandreth (not Mrs. Gaskell, the authoress).

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 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]

[33] _Life of Lord Houghton_, by T. Wemyss Reid, vol. i. p. 524.

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.