But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it." The latter part of the second letter to Miss Clarke shows Miss Nightingale's interest in speculations about the basis of moral law; but so far as the rivalry of Churches was concerned, it was by works that she tried them. "In all the dens of disgrace and disease," she wrote in one of her note-books (1849), "the only clergy who deserve the name of _pastors_ are the Roman Catholic. The rest, of all denominations--Church of England, Church of Scotland, Dissenters--are only theology or tea mongers." "It will never do," she once said to a friend, "unless we have a Church of which the terms of membership shall be works, not doctrines."[33] [33] _Life of Lord Houghton_, by T. Wemyss Reid, vol. i. p. 524. She was interested, however, in doctrines also. If she was resolved to dedicate her life to the Service of Man, she was no less convinced that such service could only be rendered, at the best and highest, in the light, and with the sanction, of Service to God. Herein may be found an underlying unity and harmony through the many and diverse interests of her life. We shall see that she who opened new careers and standards of practical benevolence in the modern world, spent also years of thought upon the less manageable task, if not of providing the world with a new religion, at any rate of giving to old doctrines a new application, and, as she hoped, a more acceptable sanction. CHAPTER IV DISAPPOINTMENT (1846-1847) There are Private Martyrs as well as burnt or drowned ones. Society of course does not know them; and Family cannot, because our position to one another in our families is, and must be, like that of the Moon to the Earth. The Moon revolves round her, moves with her, never leaves her. Yet the Earth never sees but one side of her; the other side remains for ever unknown.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (in a Note-book of 1847-49). A poet of our time has counted "Disappointment's dry and bitter root" among the ingredients of "the right mother-milk to the tough hearts that pioneer their kind." If it indeed be so, Florence Nightingale was well nurtured. The spiritual experiences and speculations, recorded in the last chapter, worked round to a justification, as we have seen, of her chosen plan of life. Religion thus brought no consolation for the failure of her scheme to escape in December 1845. "My misery and vacuity afterwards," she wrote in an autobiographical retrospect, "were indescribable." "All my plans have been wrecked," she wrote at the time, "and my hopes destroyed, and yet without any visible, any material change." She faced the new year and its life on the old lines in a mood of depression which, with some happier intervals, was to grow deeper and more intense during the next few years.