Happily, too, she was not blinded by the narrow sectarian view of religion which was, in her day and generation, so often a part of the parrot belief of those who learned their English version of the faith by rote, rather than with the soul’s experience, for she goes on to say:— “In this respect (and why is it so?) in Roman Catholic countries, both writers and workers are, in theory at least, far before ours. They would never think of such a beginning for a good-working Superior or Sister of Charity. And many a Superior has refused to admit a postulant who appeared to have no better ‘vocation’ or reasons for offering herself than these. “It is true we make no ‘vows.’ But is a ‘vow’ necessary to convince us that the true spirit for learning any art, most especially an art of charity, aright, is not a disgust to everything or something else? Do we really place the love of our kind (and of nursing as one branch of it) so low as this? What would the Mère Angélique of Port Royal, what would our own Mrs. Fry, have said to this?” How silly, in the light of these words, was the gossip of the idle person, proud of her shopping and her visiting list and her elaborate choice of dinner, who greeted the news of this nursing embassy to the Crimea with such cheap remarks as that the women would be all invalided home in a month; that it was most improper for “young ladies”—for it was not only shop assistants who were called “young ladies” in early Victorian days—to nurse in a military hospital; it was only nonsense to try and “nurse soldiers when they did not even yet know what it was to nurse a baby!” Such folly would only shake its hardened old noddle on reading, in the _Times_ reprint of the article in the _Examiner_, that Miss Nightingale was “a young lady of singular endowments both natural and acquired. In a knowledge of the ancient languages and of the higher branches of mathematics, in general art, science, and literature, her attainments are extraordinary. There is scarcely a modern language which she does not understand, and she speaks French, German, and Italian as fluently as her native English. She has visited and studied all the various nations of Europe, and has ascended the Nile to its remotest cataract. Young (about the age of our Queen), graceful, feminine, rich, popular, she holds a singularly gentle and persuasive influence over all with whom she comes in contact. Her friends and acquaintances are of all classes and persuasions, but her happiest place is at home, in the centre of a very large band of accomplished relatives.”