And both these sayings are true. Every brick is of consequence, every dab of mortar, that it may be as good as possible in building up your house. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link: therefore every link is of consequence. And there can be no “small” thing in Nursing. How often we have seen a Nurse’s life wrecked, in its usefulness, by some apparently small fault! Perhaps this is to say that there can be no small things in the nursing service of God. But in the service of ourselves, oh! how small the things are! Of no consequence indeed. How small they will appear to us all some day! For what does it profit a Nurse if she gain the whole world to praise her, and lose her own soul in conceit? What does it profit if the judgment of the whole world is for us Nurses, and God’s is against us? It is a real danger, in works like these, when all men praise us. We must then see if we are “rooted and grounded in Christ Himself,” to nurse as _He_ would have us nurse, as _He_ was in God, to do _His_ Saviour-work. Am I His, or am I not? It is a real danger, too, if in works like these we do not uphold the credit of our School. That is _not_ bearing fruit. Can we hope, may we hope that, at least, some day, Christ may say even to our Training School, as He did once to His first followers, “Ye are the salt of the earth”? But oh! if we may hope this, let us never forget for one moment the terrible conclusion of that verse. If we can, in the faintest sense, be called “the salt “of God’s nursing world, let us watch, watch, watch, that we may never lose our “savour.” One woman, as we well know, may be honoured by God to be “the salt” to purify a whole Ward. One woman may have lost her “savour,” and a Ward be left without its “salt,” and untold harm done. We ought to be very much obliged to our kind Medical Instructor for the pains he has taken with us, and to show this by our careful attention. Without this there can be no improvement. There is a time for all things--a time to be trained, and a time to use our training. And if we have thrown away the year we have here, we can hardly recover it. Besides, what a shame it is to come here, as Probationers, at considerable cost (to others, most of us), and then not to make our improvement the chief business of our lives, so that at the end of our year we go away not much better but rather worse than we came! What account can we give of such a waste of time and opportunities, of the best gifts of God, to ourselves and to Him? “For God requireth that which is past.” If, when I was young, there had been such opportunities of training for Hospital work as you have, how eagerly I should have made the most of them!