When Jesus told his followers how much we all need God's love, it was not a theological treatise. Instead, he told a story: There once was a man who had two sons... The simplicity of this famous parable belies some richly profound truths. The story Francis Thompson tells in his classic poem The Hound of Heaven works in exactly this way--stirring our hearts with a yearning we may not fully understand. Something comes through the poem that we cannot quite put our finger on... This book actually contains two versions of the poem, the original and a modern adaptation. Despite the depth and beauty of the poem, it is written in a vernacular difficult to understand. Our rationale for the adaptation of this masterpiece is to reveal its timeless beauty and insights for a broad, modern audience.

The following notes are by no means intended as a rule of thought by which nurses can teach themselves to nurse, still less as a manual to teach nurses to nurse. They are meant simply to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others. Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid, -in other words, every woman is a nurse. Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognized as the knowledge which every one ought to have-distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have