The state of perfect love, expressing itself in perfect rightness of thought and deed, may be unattainable on earth, but nothing lower than the search for this ideal can satisfy the yearnings of a soul such as was Florence Nightingale's. She had the _Hunger for Righteousness_. "The crown of _righteousness_!" she wrote to Miss Nicholson (May 1846). "That word always strikes me more than anything in the Bible. Strange that not happiness, not rest, not forgiveness, not glory, should have been the thought of that glorious man's mind, when at the eve of the last and greatest of his labours; all desires so swallowed up in the one great craving after _righteousness_ that, at the end of all his struggles, it was mightier within him than ever, mightier even than the desire of peace. How can people tell one to dwell within a good conscience, when the chief of all the apostles so panted after righteousness that he considered it the last best gift, unattainable on earth, to be bestowed in Heaven?" To do _All for the Love of God_ was the ideal which she sought to attain. "The foundation of all must be the love of God. That the sufferings of Christ's life were intense, who doubts? but the happiness must also have been intense. Only think of the happiness of working, and working successfully too, and with no doubts as to His path, and with no alloy of vanity or love of display or glory, but with the ecstasy of single-heartedness! All that I do is always poisoned by the fear that I am not doing it in simplicity and godly sincerity." This was one of the constant dreads throughout her life. When she had become famous, and was praised and courted by the popular breath, she shrank, with an abhorrence which some may have considered almost morbid and which was certainly foreign to the fashion of the world, from any avoidable publicity. This was no pose or affectation; it was part of her religion. It was a counsel dictated by her earnest striving to dissociate her work for God from any taint of worldliness. III