gain, the more progress we can make. The progress you make in your year's training with us is as nothing to what you must make every year _after_ your year's training is over. A woman who thinks in herself: 'Now I am a full Nurse, a skilled Nurse, I have learnt all that there is to be learnt'--take my word for it, she does not know what a Nurse is, and she never will know; she is gone back already." This rule applies to the technical side of the work, and perhaps yet more to the moral side. Nurses cannot avoid exercising a moral influence. They exercise it by their characters, and no point can ever be reached at which a woman can say, "Now my character is perfect." "Nurses are not chaplains"; "it is what a nurse is in herself, and what comes out of herself, out of what she _is_ (almost without knowing it herself) that exercises a moral or religious influence over her patients. No set form of words is of any use. And patients are so quick to see whether a Nurse is consistent always in herself--whether she _is_ what she _says_ to them. And if she is not, it is no use. If she is, of how much use may the simplest word of soothing, of comfort, or even of reproof--especially in the quiet night--be to the roughest patient! But if she wishes to do this, she must keep up a sort of divine calm and high sense of duty in her own mind." And every good nurse ought to wish to do this, because her opportunities are unique. "Hospital nurses have charge of their patients in a way that no other woman has charge. No other woman is in charge really of grown-up men. Also the hospital nurse is in charge of people when they are singularly alive to impressions. She leaves her stamp upon them whether she will or no." [160] For the dates of these Addresses, see Bibliography A, No. 63. Such are the leading ideas which Miss Nightingale develops in her series of Hospital Sermons. I have heard it said that she addressed the Nurses in the style and spirit of the Sunday School. There are passages to which such a description may be applied; but, taken as a whole, the discourses suggest a different comparison: they recall the style and spirit of the best Public School or College Sermons. Sometimes the likeness is close and explicit. On one occasion Miss Nightingale thought that the prevailing evil in her School was a spirit of irresponsible and ill-informed criticism. She rebuked it by telling a true story, which perhaps she may have had from Mr. Jowett:--