This was the creed by which Miss Nightingale guided her life; this, the path to perfection along which she ever moved. There was nothing ecstatic in her mysticism, though she notes occasionally that she heard "The voice," and often that she was conscious of receiving "strong impressions." They were impressions which came in moments of imaginative insight, but yet which followed rationally from self-examination and meditation on her creed. Patience and resignation were the states of the purified soul which she found hardest of attainment. She marked for her edification many a passage from devotional writers in which such virtues are enjoined; as in this from Thomas à Kempis: "Oh Lord my God, patience is very necessary for me, for I perceive that many things in this life do fall out as we would not.... It is so, my son. But my will is that thou seek not that peace which is void of temptations, or which suffereth nothing contrary; but rather think that thou hast found peace, when thou art exercised with sundry tribulations and tried in many adversities." Her tribulations were often caused, she confessed, by her impatience. "O Lord, even now I am trying to snatch the management of Thy world out of Thy hands." The middle path of perfection between the acquiescence of the quietist and the impatience of the worker was hard. "Too little have I looked for something higher and better than my own work--the work of Supreme Wisdom, which uses us whether we know it or not. O God to Thy glory not to mine whatever happens, may be all my thought!" Miss Nightingale's meditations, written in the purgatorial stage, are many and poignant. But there were times also when the mount of illumination was reached, when "the palace of her soul" was enlarged to receive the indwelling Presence, and she found the perfect peace of the mystic in the consciousness of union with the Supreme Wisdom; times when on the wings of the soul she attained with Dante to the empyrean:-- Lume è lassù che visibile face Lo Creatore a quella creatura, Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace. Perfected in weakness, she was strong in moments of illumination "to see God in all things, and all things in God, the Eternal shining through the accidents of space and time." [147] [147] Letter to Mr. Jowett, April 17, 1873. CHAPTER III MISS NIGHTINGALE'S SCHOOL (1872-1879) Let each Founder train as many in his or her spirit as he or she can. Then the pupils will in their turn be Founders also.-- FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.