APPENDIX. Protestant Sisters of Charity.-p. 319. "My friend C is a country clergyman. In his youth he was an officer in the army, and served during several campaigns in the late war in the Peninsula. Having a pleasing figure and countenance, very animated manners, an amiable disposition, and buoyant spirits, he was a great favourite both with men and women in the numerous circle of his acquaintance, and indulged in all that gaiety and dissipation for which the warm southern nations of the continent offer such tempting and boundless opportunities. At the conclusion of the war, he quitted the army, looked round for a profession, and, unsuitable as it may appear, fixed on the church; and having passed the requisite time at College, Cambridge, in honest and earnest study, he took orders, married, and obtained a curacy. He is now living in the retired and beautiful village of, in the county of. The contemplations and active duties of religion have generated in him a mood of mind adapted to his holy office. He is naturally eloquent; he has a ready command of language-a warm and tender heart, which often trembles in his voice during the more touching and empassioned parts of his sermons. His congregation, of course, think him the most eloquent of preachers. But this is not all: to the distressed he is active in giving and procuring relief-to the sick, or those in sorrow, in offering support and consolation-in short, he is an excellent parish priest. In talking about the contrast between his past and present modes of life, he often declares that he was never happy till now, and that although his income is so narrow as to require the utmost frugality to render it equal to his expenses, he would not exchange the tranquil happiness which he derives from the duties, the contemplations, and the prospects of religion, for all the splendid gaiety, the intoxicating excitement, and the lavish expenses of his youth. He sometimes comes to town to visit me. On one of these occasions he was complaining of the difficulty of procuring medical attendance for the sick poor of his parish, many of whom lived far from the town where the parish surgeon resides. The surgeon himself was too busy in visiting his rich patients-his assistant was ignorant and inattentive-and my friend was convinced that his poor sick flock often suffered a length of illness, and sometimes death, which earlier and better care might have prevented. This gave him great pain, and he was wishing that it was possible to procure a few women of a superior order to the generality of nurses, and taught by a residence in the hospitals to recognize and relieve the most common kinds of illness. They should be,' he added, 'animated with religion. Science and mere humanity cannot be relied on. An order of women such as these, distributed among the country parishes in the kingdom, would be of incalculable value. It was formerly the boast of the Catholics that the Protestants had no missionaries. That boast is silenced, but they may still affirm that Protestantism has not yet produced her Sisters of Charity.' เ "When I was in Flanders a short time ago, I saw at Bruges and Ghent some of this singular and useful order of Nunsthey are all of a respectable station in society, and I was told that it is not uncommon for the females of the most wealthy, and even noble families, voluntarily to quit the world and its pleasures, and enter this order, and dedicate themselves to the most menial attendance on the sick. I went one morning to the hospital at Bruges; all the nurses are 'Beguines,' and it was a striking sight to see these women, whose countenances, manners, and a something in the quality, or cleanness of their stiff white hoods, and black russet gowns, expressive of a station superior to their office, one with a pail in her hand, another down on her knees washing the floor of the chapel. The physician to the hospital spoke in the highest terms of the humility and tenderness with which they nursed his patients. When I fell ill myself, which I did during my stay in this town, I was near having a Sister of Charity for my nurse. 66 My friend is right. The attendants on the sick, whether professional or menial, are commonly actuated by scientific. zeal, by mere natural humanity, or by mercenary motives; but these cannot be trusted to for steady attention—the one subsides with the solution of a question, the other hardens by habit, the last requires jealous inspection-there are long intervals of indifference, and apathy, and inattention-we want an actuating motive of a more steady and enduring nature, which requires neither curiosity, nor emotion, nor avarice to keep it alive, which still burns in the most tranquil states of mind, and out of the reach of human inspection, and this motive is religion. "I have often seen, and still often see (for I must let out the secret that I am a physician,) cases in which the sufferings of illness are much increased, and I have every reason to believe the chances of recovery much diminished, by a want of persevering attention to the sick; but an example occurred to me when I was a young man, which at the time when it happened affected me much, and has left on my mind an indelible impression. Whilst I was a student at the university of —, and during one of the long vacations which I was spending at on the coast of an English frigate cap |
