tutions founded
by Pastor Fliedner at Kaiserswerth in Prussia, and in those at Mildmay
in England. She has also made a thorough and discriminating study of the
subject as developed in the early centuries of the Church and in the
Middle Ages.

The book itself will amply reveal these facts, and cannot but contribute
largely to the guidance of the newly revived interest of the American
churches in the far-reaching question how Christian women may best serve
their Lord in serving the humanity which he has redeemed.

It appears at an opportune time. The General Conference of the Methodist
Episcopal Church, at its session in May, 1888, inserted in the law of
the Church a chapter on deaconesses, defining their duties and
providing for the appointment and oversight of them through the Annual
Conferences. This action was the natural outcome of a wide and
increasing appreciation of the service of Christian women in many
departments of Church work; and it was greatly furthered by the advocacy
of Dr. J. M. Thoburn, now the devoted and honored missionary bishop of
India and Malaysia. But it had not been the subject of any considerable
previous discussion in the periodicals of the Church, and there was not
in the Church a widely diffused or an accurate knowledge of the history,
scope, possibilities, or perils of such an organization. The promptness,
however, with which the provision thus made by the General Conference
has been seized upon by the Church in several of our large cities,
indicates that the time was ripe for the movement. But information is
still scanty; ideas concerning the aim and place of the deaconess work
are crude; methods have been very little digested; the foundations of
local homes evidently may come to be very imperfectly laid; and the
movement may easily come to naught.

This book, it is hoped, will do a twofold work. It will awaken a lively
interest in a movement already arrived at large proportions in some
parts of European Protestantism; and it will guide those among us who
are studying how best to organize, against the sin and suffering of the
world, the practically unlimited resources of Christian women. Whenever
any one shall in some good degree apprehend what helpfulness for the
lost as yet lies undeveloped in the hearts and hands of the daughters of
the Church, and what honor may yet come to Christianity by the rightly
directed use of this power, he will welcome a volume which, like the
present one,