nce the steadiness of their motives
and the steadiness of their nerves? Such a trial is absolutely
necessary; for hundreds of women will fall into the common error of
mistaking an impulse for a vocation. But I do believe that there are
also hundreds who are fitted, or would gladly, at any self-sacrifice,
fit themselves for the work, if the means of doing so were allowed to
them. At present, an English lady has no facilities whatever for
obtaining the information or experience required; no such institutions
are open to her, and yet she is ridiculed for presenting herself without
the competent knowledge! This seems hardly just."

Anticipating objection, Mrs. Jameson says:

"To make or require vows of obedience is objectionable; yet we know that
the voluntary nurses who went to the East were called upon to do what
comes to the same thing--to sign an engagement to obey implicitly a
controlling and administrative power--or the whole undertaking must have
fallen to the ground. Then again, questions about costume have been
mooted, which appear to me wonderfully absurd. It has been suggested
that there should be something of uniformity and fitness in the dress
when on duty, and this seems but reasonable. I recollect once seeing a
lady in a gay, light, muslin dress, with three or four flounces, and
roses under bonnet, going forth to visit her sick poor. The incongruity
struck the mind painfully--not merely as an incongruity, but as an
impropriety--like a soldier going to the trenches in an opera hat and
laced ruffles. Such follies, arising from individual obtuseness, must be
met by regulation dictated by good sense, and submitted to as a matter
of necessity and obligation."

Again, says our authoress, who passed from her sphere of usefulness in
1860:

"It is a subject of reproach, that in this Christendom of ours, the
theory of good we preach should be so far in advance of our practice;
but that which provokes the sneer of the skeptic, and almost kills faith
in the sufferer, lifts up the contemplative mind with hope. Man's
_theory_ of good is God's _reality_; man's experience is the degree to
which he has already worked out, in his human capacity, that divine
reality. Therefore, whatever our practice may be, let us hold fast to
our theories of possible good; let us, at least, however they may outrun
our present powers, keep them in sight, and then our formal, lagging
practice, may in time overtake them. In social morals, as