Page:Nurses for the sick.djvu/21

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NURSES FOR THE SICK.
17

the question of paid and unpaid labour is one that is not easy of solution in this country. All the foreign institutions, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have acted on the principle of unpaid labour, providing only the present means of subsistence and a prospect of future maintenance in old age as inducements for the devotion of life and service to this cause. Is it because England is pre-eminently the country of the worship of Mammon that the principle is more difficult of adoption here, and that wages in actual money are thought to be absolutely essential to the performance of the work? However this may be, we will not dwell upon, or attempt to decide, the point. We will grant that there may be labourers of both kinds admitted to this work; some who have no earthly ties for whom to make provision may cheerfully and gladly devote themselves to it from the highest motives of love and self-sacrifice alone, while others there may be to whom present remuneration appears necessary. But for both classes of workers we must make this stipulation: there must be, over and above, or perhaps rather beneath, every other motive, the one conviction that it is work for God that they are called upon to do. Whether or not it can be best done by those who look for no reward here, we are quite sure that a very high tone of feeling and source of action is necessary for those who enter upon this difficult, but noble profession. Yet it is