This applies of course to every woman in the world; but it applies more especially to us, because we know no one calling in the world, except it be that of teaching, in which _what we can do_ depends so much upon _what we are_. To be _a good Nurse_ one must be _a good woman_; or one is truly nothing but a tinkling bell. To be a good woman at all, one must be an improving woman; for stagnant waters sooner or later, and stagnant air, as we know ourselves, always grow corrupt and unfit for use. Is any one of us a _stagnant woman_? Let it not have to be said by any one of us: I left this Home a worse woman than I came into it. I came in with earnest purpose, and now I think of little but my own satisfaction and a good place. When the head and the hands are very full, as in Nursing, it is so easy, so very easy, if the heart has not an earnest purpose for God and our neighbour, to end in doing one’s work only for oneself, and not at all--even when we seem to be serving our neighbours--not at all for them or for God. I should hardly like to talk of a subject which, after all, must be very much between each one of us and her God,--which is hardly a matter for _talk_ at all, and certainly not for me, who cannot be among you (though there is nothing in the world I should so dearly wish), but that I thought perhaps you might like to hear of things which persons in the same situation, that is, in different Training Schools on the Continent, have said to me. I will mention two or three: 1. One said, “The greatest help I ever had in life was that we were taught in our Training School always to raise our hearts to God the first thing on waking in the morning.” Now it need hardly be said that we cannot make a rule for this; a rule will not teach this, any more than making a rule that the chimney shall not smoke will make the smoke go up the chimney. If we occupy ourselves the last thing at night with rushing about, gossiping in one another’s rooms; if our last thoughts at night are of some slight against ourselves, or spite against another, or about each other’s tempers, it is needless to say that our first thoughts in the morning will not be of God. Perhaps there may even have been some quarrel; and if those who pretend to be educated women indulge in these irreligious uneducated disputes, what a scandal before those less educated, to whom an example, not a stone of offence, should be set! “A thousand irreligious cursed hours” (as some poet says), have not seldom, in the lives of all but a few whom we may truly call Saints upon earth, been spent on some feeling of ill-will. And can we expect to be really able to lift up our hearts the first thing in the morning to the God of “good will towards men” if we do this? I speak for myself, even more perhaps than for others.