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 well as in physical truth, ’the goal of yesterday will be the starting-point of to-morrow,’ and the things before which all England now stands in admiring wonder will become the simple produce of the common day.  This we hope and believe.”