before the very Houses of Parliament are extolled in the warmest terms of admiration and approval. But this is not all; within three days of the time when the want was first made known, two hundred and eighty women of gentle birth applied for permission to go out to the East, as sisters of charity; showing by the most incontestable proof what treasures of devotion and self-denial -what wealth of energy and talent whereby thousands might be influenced for good, we have wasted and destroyed by the wretched narrow-minded system we have already described.

Further, it is a most significant fact that out of these two hundred and eighty ladies, fourteen only were chosen to go on the mission of mercy, which all coveted so eagerly. And why was this? Simply because, owing to the prejudice which denounced, first, the single life, as such; and, secondly, every species of religious community; it was found that the whole education, ideas, and habits of those gentlewomen unfitted them entirely for the work, essentially feminine and Christian as it is.

But this belongs to the mistakes of the past; and it is with the future and its better hopes that we have now to do. There can be no question that the tide of popular feeling on this subject is fairly turned; a great movement is taking place in favour of sisterhoods; almost, we might say, a great revival, remembering what England, the Isle of Saints, once was. The absolute necessity of some organized system of sisters of charity seems to be almost everywhere recognized amongst us. In fact, the pressing want of the present moment is not stayed. Inkerman has followed Alma, tenfold more sanguinary in its results; and the call for nurses and yet more nurses is louder than ever. At home, too, a similar want seems suddenly to have been discovered. Some admirable papers appeared in the Guardian lately, demonstrating the absolute necessity of our hospitals being provided with a better class of nurses than the low and often degraded women who are generally appointed to the office. Penitentiaries, prisons, schools, populous parishes, all these and many more require, and would, we believe, now willingly accept the services of sisters of charity, if they could be found among the members of our own communion.

Nor is it only that the value and importance of their office has at length been recognised in England, but there seems to be a general awakening to that truth never forgotten by the Church, however opposed by the world, that this high and blessed calling is indeed one of the true vocations of women-one in which not only she may find her purest happiness here, and her exceeding great reward hereafter, but in which she may also largely benefit her fellow-creatures, and give full scope among the fatherless and widows, to all those sympathies and affections natural to her sex, which in the life of the single woman, generally, are either turned to bitterness or left to run miserably to waste. Very truly it may

be said of the sister of charity, "that the desolate hath many more children than she that hath an husband.”

It is singular enough that the want which has now made itself felt so deeply amongst us, should have been detected by a Frenchman, at least so far as regards hospitals, even in the time of Louis XVI. This monarch sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire into the management of our hospitals. On his return he praised them much, but added, "Il y manque deux choses; nos curés et nos hospitalières;" "that is," says the author (Mrs. Jameson) who records the circumstance, "he felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical treatment of the sick."

Now, however, that this deficiency in our social system has been discovered in all its extent, and that the revulsion of feeling in consequence has been such as we have described, it remains to be considered how this movement can be made practically available, and in what manner the awakened desires and energies of thousands may be regulated and concentrated, so as to admit of the organization of a system which will become really operative, and a portion, solid and lasting, of our national constitution.

This is a very important question, and one which we trust, most earnestly, will receive due consideration from abler heads than those which have hitherto taken cognizance of it.

For ourselves, we shall only venture in these brief pages to offer a few suggestions which have sprung naturally from observing the results of those attempts which have already been made in this line.

The first great principle which must evidently be laid down as the very foundation of the whole system, is clearly this that it must be established and conducted in and by the Church alone. The sisters of charity must exist only as her handmaids holding office from her, and in all things working for her.

This, we maintain, must be their one great and unchanging law, whether they form part of a society banded together in one common dwelling, or of an order, who without the cloistered life or vow, might be disciplined to work most usefully in a wider sphere. And here, at the very outset, we must call the attention of our readers to the serious mistake which has been made by those who have already established religious houses amongst us, in supposing that women must work as sisters of charity only in the cloister and under severe conventual rule, thereby circumscribing most miserably not only the extent of their work, but the numbers who either could or would attempt it; confounding, in fact, the contemplative and the active life, in a manner highly injurious to both. The restraints, seclusion, and asceticism necessary for the one, can never be combined with the activity, hard labour and unlimited scope required by the other. If our single women are only to be made use of within four walls, and under strict obligation to meet all the requirements of the highest order of the religious life, we

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should not find one in a hundred amongst our masses of that class, whose moral and physical constitution would render them fit for such a position. Without so much as mentioning other hindrances of a more tangible nature.

We have now before us a pamphlet which takes this matter gravely into consideration, and treats of the manner in which women may be employed as true sisters of charity without absolutely entering convents, or taking irrevocable vows. It contains so much practical good sense, that we are disposed to quote largely from its contents; a proceeding which, we are sure, will not be unwelcome to our readers, when we mention that the author of it is none other than Miss Nightingale. And indeed its author has some right to speak, for being herself a single woman she appears to have done years ago the very wisest thing she could, in setting herself to learn the work of a sister of charity without any definite aim, so that when it pleased God to call her through the voice of the nation to a right noble task, she was found ready for the summons, with a large store of knowledge and experience. Some of her opening remarks on the miserable sort of existence to which unmarried women have hitherto been condemned, coincide so perfectly with what we have already said on this subject, that we cannot forbear transcribing them.

Speaking of the young women of England, she

says

"And we must confess that, in the present state of things, their horror of being old maids' seems perfectly justified; it is not merely a foolish desire for the pomp and circumstance of marriage-a 'life without love and an activity without an aim' is horrible in idea, and wearisome in reality.

"How many good women every one has known, who have married, without caring particularly for their husbands, in order to find-a very natural object a sphere for their activity (though it might be asked, whether it were not better to take care of the children, who are already in the world, than to bring more into existence in order to have them to take care of.) How many others we know who are suffering from ill health, merely from having nothing particular to do. Go and visit the poor' is always said; and the best-those who have the deepest feeling of the importance of this occupation-answer in their souls, (if not aloud) we do not know how.' If we only go into the cottages to talk, we see little difference between gossiping with the poor and gossiping with the rich; or if our intercourse is to be merely grounded upon the ' two-and-sixpence,' or the load of coals, we don't know whether we do as much good as we do harm.' On finding a cottage, generally comfortable looking and respectable, one day in the strangest state of nakedness and disorder, the woman answered, La! now! why when the district visiting ladies comes, if we didn't put everything topsy-turvy, they wouldn't give us anything.'

"To be able to visit well is not a thing which comes by instinct, but on the contrary is one of the rarest accomplishments; but when attained, what a blessing to both visitors and visited. The want of

necessary occupation among English girls must have struck every one. How usual it is to see families, five or six daughters at home with no other occupation in life than a class in a Sunday-school; and what is that a chapter of the Bible is opened at random, and the spiritual doctor, with no more idea of her patient's malady than she has plan for improving it, explains at random. In the middle classes how many there are who feel themselves burdensome to their fathers, or brothers; but who not finding husbands, and not having the education to be governesses, do not know what to do with themselves. Intellectual education is, however, as before said, not what we want to supply. Is intellect enough for the being who was sent here, like her Great Master, to finish' her FATHER'S 'work?' There was a woman once who said that she was the handmaid of the LORD.' She was not the first, nor will she be the last, who has felt that this was really woman's only business on earth.

"If, then, there are many who live unmarried, and many more who pass the third of the usual term of life unmarried, and if intellectual occupation is not meant to be their end in life, what are they to do with that thirst for action, useful action, which every woman feels who is not diseased in mind or body. GOD planted it there-GOD Who has created nothing in vain-what were His intentions with regard to 'unmarried women and widows?" How did He mean to employ them to satisfy them?

We

"For every want we can always find a Divine supply; and accordingly we see, in the very first times of Christianity, an apostolical institution, for the employment of woman's powers directly in the service of GOD. We find them engaged as servants of the Church.' read in the Epistle to the Romans of a Deaconess,' as in the Acts of the Apostles of Deacons ;' not only men were employed in the service of the rich and poor, but also women. In the fourth century, S. Chrysostom speaks of forty Deaconesses at Constantinople. We find them in the Western Church as late as the eighth, and in the Eastern as the twelfth century."

All this will commend itself to every mind as being an eminently truthful statement of the real condition of single women in England, and we can but the more earnestly seek a remedy. In what we have said of the mistaken principle which, amongst ourselves, has sought to confine our sisterhoods of charity solely to a life of seclusion and severe religious rule-we would most earnestly deprecate the supposition that we do in any degree underrate the value of the (so to speak) cloistered community-so far from that, we regard it as the most important element of the system, which we hope to see generally organized, and one on which our best hopes must always be fixed; but forasmuch as the self-denial and devotedness essential to the life are eminently difficult of attainment, and an ascetic seclusion incompatible with many branches of the sister's work, it is highly important that women should not find themselves confined to these channels alone when they would seek to become the active handmaids of the LORD.

We shall, however, treat of these conventual sisterhoods first, as being the highest branch of the order, and that to which all penitentiaries should be annexed.

Some of these communities, as we have said, already existing, we have the benefit of their experience in detecting various errors which must be avoided in future establishments. Of these there is one which has been universal to them all, though contrary to the precedent of the Church in every age, and it is this, that there has been no place of training or probation provided for the education of women in the sister's life, before they are permitted even to offer themselves for it. Surely it stands to reason, that without this we never can have properly organized communities or any results from them which will be stable and efficient.-The vocation of a sister of charity, as it is the highest, so also is it the most difficult to which a woman can be called, and it is just as impossible that she should rightly perform it without previous training, as that a physician or a priest should be fitted for their profession without the necessary preparation. Let us look at the effect of what has been done hitherto without this most essential preliminary. We have seen many young women of gentle birth leaving their luxurious home with its thousand enervating and softening influences, its habits of ease and inactivity, to enter abruptly into sisterhoods, conducted on the severest principles of conventualism. There they are at once plunged into a system of asceticism, labour, and rigid obedience, into which communions wiser in this respect than ours, would never dream of initiating any woman who had not gone through a progressive training of several years' extent, and only then, if she displayed a marked vocation; and what has been the result with us? Some few have struggled through this fiery ordeal and come out from it disciplined by a painful experience instead of a judicious schooling for the holy life in which they ultimately fix themselves: but this is not without a measure of suffering and risk to which they ought never to have been subjected; while of many others a very different tale may be told. Some, after a time, have left the sisterhood broken in health and hopes, finding themselves, perhaps, both morally and physically unsuited for the life, and yet with a conscience-stricken dread, that they have shrunk from a high calling which renders them wholly unfit for any lower kind of life; and others again, who, had they been better known, would never have been permitted to cross the threshold of such dwellings, have gone forth from them to turn basely against those who received and trusted them, and to do incalculable mischief by publishing false and exaggerated statements concerning the faith and practice of the inmates. All such contingencies, we maintain, would be perfectly avoided by the establishment of training houses, where persons might be taught and tested, and where they would have an opportunity of understanding.