Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale: Selections and Commentaries

Chapter 6. On the Spiritual Life

6. On the Spiritual Life Unless you make a life which shall be the manifestation of your religion, it does not much signify what you believe. Our religious creed consists in this—belief in an omnipotent eternal spirit of love, wisdom, righteousness, manifesting itself by calling into existence, by definite laws, beings capable of the happiness of love, wisdom, righteousness ,—capable of advancing themselves and each other in divine nature—living in an universe in which, by definite law, the means and inducement are afforded which insure their advance through their own activity to humanity's blessedness. Whatever contributes to the advance of man's nature from the imperfect towards the perfect, whatever helps ignorance to knowledge, helps us to know and feel the Father, to enrich His Holy Spirit as existing within each of us. Is it not evident that it is the spirit of God within man which undergoes suffering and privation? For what do we know of the spirit of God but that it is a spirit of righteousness, wisdom, goodness, love, benevolence, as manifested in the laws of existence? and what is all suffering and privation but a counteraction of, a contradiction to, a limiting of these attributes? Perhaps it may be susceptible of evidence that there is no existence which can be called human, in which these attributes do not exist. If wecan trace as existing in man, limited only in degree, all that we know or can know of God, is it not evident that man is God "manifest in the flesh?" Perhaps, if man becomes wise enough, he may call out, by the organization of life and by education, whatever there may be of such attributes in every human being; and certainly it cannot now be denied that the tendency is to prove the existence of such attributes, wherever human nature exists. Experience and consciousness teach us that that which comes to us I On the Spiritual Life 117 through exercise of some part or parts of our nature is of more value than that of which we are passiverecipients—or, rather, we mayperhapssaythat such is our nature that it is impossible for us to be passiverecipients of any good thing. Should we not expect, then, that the will of God, or of goodness, for the beings whom His will calls into existence, would be a good original nature, well exercisedin life? It may be shown that such is His will. Suppose we were to imagine that those beings, whom His will calls into existence, possessed the best of natures, viz., His own, and that God's laws were adapted to exercise these best of natures, as righteousness, benevolence, and wisdom decree. It is susceptible of evidence that such is actually the case. Suppose the laws of the materialnature discovered, suppose mankind, individually and collectively, through successive generations, earnestly seeking to keepthem aright, cananyone doubt that the limits, now existing fanciful? Does not experience warrant such a belief? Suppose that, instead of life being regulated ignorantly, with little definite purpose, mankind, individually and collectively, aimed to organize life so asto improve character , i.e., so as to extend the limits of the divine in man: can we doubt that thus man would, by exercise for himself and his kind, become more and more divine? Individual men are part of a whole, of mankind, of the Son. They are attainers^ acquirersof what the Father isand has.They are in Him, one with him, in proportion asthey attain to be and to know truth. Different partsof one whole are contributing to one purpose in the case of mankind. Mankind is transmuting itself into the divine by exercise through God's communication of the divine. Man is utterly incapableof anything, except in as far as he receives, but he can receive nothing except through exercise, appropriate exerciseof his own nature. Nightingale's conception of the spiritual life is basedon the mystical teaching that "the imperfect is the Perfect limited by material relations or, in other words, that man is God, modified by physical law." Thiswas not an abstractionfor Nightingale but "the essence of common sense,"1 i. From the preface to Notesfrom DevotionalAuthors of theMiddle Ages; quoted in Cook, Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2, p.235. to the exercise of the divine nature in man, would be enlarged:? Is this * * * n8 Suggestionsfor Thought grounded in the facts of experience. She observed that the...