Sister Agnes gradually evolved an idea of a great hospital richly endowed and well officered, ruled by a competent governing body, and animated throughout by one idea--_to heal by the shortest and most effectual methods, the sufferers who sought its portals_; to take as the guiding principle of all the work done there, _not_ possibly better methods for better patients, but the best existing methods for the present occupants of its beds. The motto of the place to be, "Honour all men." A revolution indeed! A work of such magnitude that its inception seemed Quixotic!
Things, however, had come to this pass that she could no longer retain her position at St. Bernard's; and feeling that she could do nothing there to elaborate her scheme, she left the hospital, and took time to consider what her next step should be. She did not leave a bit too soon; things had been rather unpleasant of late. There were several patients who, at a hint from her, had taken themselves off from St. Bernard's with all their limbs about them, who would have gone out minus one or other of these useful appendages had they remained much longer, and the loss of these valuable opportunities had very properly been charged to Sister Agnes's account. She was accused of not showing sufficient interest in the welfare of the place.
God says, "Sweat For foreheads;" men say, "Crowns:" and so we are crowned; Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel, Which snaps with a secret spring. _Elizabeth B. Browning._
If to the city sped--what waits him there? To see profusion that he must not share; To see ten thousand baneful arts combined, To pamper luxury and thin mankind. _Goldsmith_ ("_Deserted Village_").
What is the perfect life for a Christian man or woman? It was settled once for all by our Lord. "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor"--and live in a cave, on the top of a column, in a monastic cell, or beg for daily bread from door to door? Would that fulfil the command? The nineteenth century has no place for St. Simeon's Pillar; the cells of the monks are turned to other uses than that of contemplation, which is not quite in the way of the age of steam and the telegraph; and begging and alms-giving are denounced by students of social economy. What is the precise application, then, of our Saviour's teaching to the present day? Though deaths from starvation and terrible tales of privation are not uncommon in our great cities, and the condition of the unskilled working classes is particularly unsatisfactory, there is no question that our poor even at their worst are better off by far than those of our Lord's time. Admitting the work that remains to be done in helping to raise the lower sections of society, it is in a moral rather than a material direction that our efforts must be exerted; and though our Lord's command to sell all and feed the poor is not perhaps to be interpreted literally, because the literal is not now the highest interpretation of the injunction, yet never was there a time when it was more the duty of Christian people to make great, ay, the greatest sacrifices for their fellow-men than the present. The law provides against the starvation of any human being dwelling in our midst; but it is souls rather than bodies which languish for food, and are fain to be filled with carrion. The separation which many years has been going on between class and class; the locating the workers in quarters given over to dirt, squalor, and dullness; the exodus of the cultivated minds to more congenial sections of our greater towns, where the signs of labour and the noise of work cannot disturb or annoy them; the drawing off the classes from the masses, depriving the poor man of the society, the encouragement, the teaching, the example, the brightness, the wealth, and the culture of the more leisured--it is this which is slowly but surely working, not alone the degradation of the deserted people, but a terrible punishment for the deserters. There is not a work of art, not a lofty aspiration, not a burst of song, not a beautiful face, nor a well-stored intellect, but is part of the heritage of the poor. We have as much right to cut off the poor man's oxygen or his nitrogen as to deprive him of any of the elements needful for the nourishment of his soul.