In her own case, Miss Nightingale was conscious of capacities within her for "high purposes for mankind and for God." She could not feel sure that the marriage which was offered to her would enable her to employ those capacities to their best and fullest power. And so she sacrificed her "passional" nature to her moral ideal. "I am 30," she wrote on her birthday in her diary of 1850; "the age at which Christ began His mission. Now no more childish things, no more vain things, no more love, no more marriage. Now, Lord, let me only think of Thy will." And amongst her sayings in another book, I find this: "Strong passions to teach the secrets of the human heart, and a strong will to hold them in subjection, these are the keys of the kingdom in this world and the next." Florence Nightingale turned away from marriage in order that she might remain entirely free to fulfil her vocation. III It was not a sacrifice which cost her little. If, as some may hold, she was not in love, yet she confessed to herself many of a lover's pangs, and there were moments when, as she met her admirer again, or as she thought of him, she was half inclined to repent of her choice of the single life. And the sacrifice, moreover, was of an immediate satisfaction to an ideal which after all she might never be able to realize. The legends of the saints tell of many virgins and martyrs who have crucified the flesh and sacrificed worldly happiness for the love of Christ. But when the sacrifice was made, the love which seemed to them far better was already theirs. In the ears of St. Agnes the Divine Voice had sounded with sweet assurance, and she had tasted of the milk and honey of His lips. St. Dorothea was already espoused in a garden where celestial fruits and roses that never fade surrounded her. And to Florence Nightingale also happiness was to be given, filling all her life for some years, so that she "sought no better heaven"; but at the time when she made her choice, and renounced all else to follow her ideal, the way before her was still dark and uncertain. She was conscious of a call, but she had no assurance of appointed work. To have entered into a marriage which gave no sure promise of her ideal, would have been, she felt, the suicide of a soul; yet, when she was called to choose between the two paths, her present life was starvation. Perhaps it was the price which she had paid for her ideal that led to what, in later years, some considered a certain hardness in her. When once a woman had devoted her life to the work of nursing, Miss Nightingale had little sympathy with any turning back. She seemed sometimes in such cases to regard marriage as the unpardonable sin.