Miss Nightingale's comment, when echoes of the storm reached her on the Bosphorus, was characteristic. "They tell me," she wrote to Mr. Herbert (Jan. 28, 1855), "that there is a religious war about poor me in the _Times_, and that Mrs. Herbert has generously defended me. I do not know what I have done to be so dragged before the Public. But I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low, that He is not a Romanist or an Anglican--or a Unitarian. I don't believe He is even a Russian, though His events go strangely against us. (_N.B._--A Greek once said to me at Salamis, 'I do believe God Almighty is an Englishman.')" Excellent, too, was the answer given by an Irish clergyman when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale belonged. "She belongs to a sect which, unfortunately, is a very rare one--the sect of the Good Samaritan." Miss Nightingale was by descent a Unitarian, by practice a communicant of the Church of England; but she was addicted neither to High Church nor to Low. Her God was the God of Moral Law, a God of infinite pity and benevolence, but also One who worked out His purpose by the free will of human instruments. Her service of God was the service of Man, and her service of Man mingled efficiency with tenderness. She applied only one kind of test to a nurse: Was she a good woman, and did she know her business? To be a good woman, a religious woman, a noble woman was not in itself sufficient. "Excellent, gentle, self-devoted women," Miss Nightingale said in a note upon some of her staff, "fit more for Heaven than for a Hospital, they flit about like angels without hands among the patients, and soothe their souls, while they leave their bodies dirty and neglected. They never complain, they are eager for self-mortification. But I came not to mortify the nurses, but to nurse the wounded." Therefore if a nurse was a good woman and knew her business, it was nothing that she was Romanist, Anglican, High Church, Low Church, or Unitarian. If she was not a good nurse, the fact that she belonged, or did not belong, to this or that persuasion was no recommendation. Miss Nightingale was, it is true, desirous from the first to include Roman Catholics in her staff, and she did so, in spite of many difficulties, to the end. But her reasons therein were practical, not sectarian. In the first place, many of the soldiers were Roman Catholics; and, secondly, her apprenticeship in nursing had shown her the excellent qualities, as nurses, of many Catholic Sisters. But here efficiency was the test, and a Protestant Deaconess from Kaiserswerth was all one to her with a Sister from "a Romanist establishment." And one practical advantage of vowed Sisters was that she did not lose them from marriage. One morning six nurses came in to Miss Nightingale, declaring that they one and all wished to be married. They were followed by six soldiers--sergeants and corporals--declaring their desire to claim the nurses as brides.