What is our one thing needful? To have high principles at the bottom of all. Without this, without having laid our foundation, there is small use in building up our details. That is as if you were to try to nurse without eyes or hands. We know who said, If your foundation is laid in shifting sand, you may build your house, but it will tumble down. But if you build it on solid ground, this is what is called being _rooted and grounded in Christ_. In the great persecutions in France two hundred years ago (not only of the Protestants, who came over here and settled in Spitalfields, but of all who held the higher and more spiritual religion) a noble woman, who has left her impress on the Christian Church, and who herself endured two hard imprisonments for conscience’ sake, would receive no Probationer into her Institution, which was, like ours, for works of Nursing and for the poor, till the Probationer had well considered whether she were really rooted and grounded in God himself, and not in the mere habit of obeying rule and doing her work; whether she could do without the supports of the example and fellowship of a large and friendly community, the sympathy and praise of fellow-workers--all good things in themselves, but which will not carry us through a life like Christ’s. And I doubt whether any woman whom God is forming for Himself is not at some time or other of her life tried and tested in this lonely path. A French Princess, who did well consider, and who was received into the said Institution on these conditions, has left us in writing her experience. And well she showed _where_ she was “rooted and grounded” through ten after-years of prison and persecution. We have not to endure these things. Our lot is cast in gentler times. But I will tell you an old woman’s experience--that I can never remember a time, and that I do not know a work, which so requires to be rooted and grounded in God as ours. You remember the question in the hymn, “Am I His, or am I not?” If I _am_, this is what is called our “hidden life with Christ in God.” We all have a “hidden life” in ourselves, besides our outward working life. If our hidden life is filled with chatter and fancies, our outward working life will be the fruits of it. “By their _fruits_ ye shall know them,” Christ says. Christ knows the good Nurse. It is not the good talker whom Christ knows as the good Nurse. If our hidden life _is_ “with Christ in God,” by its fruits, too, it will be known.