"

This is genuine service of man to man, and the motive of the service is
love to God. Every revelation of God is of ministering love and
compassion, and the efforts of his disciples to imitate the divine love
have indelibly stamped upon modern civilization the Christian impress.

The service of ministering compassion is so clearly one of the duties of
Christ's Church that of necessity there must be ordinances touching the
exercise of this duty. So in Acts vi, 3, we read of the appointment of
the deacons, "men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and of
wisdom," to see that the service of the tables was not neglected.

But Christian women have ever had special gifts in caring for the poor
and sick and helpless, and the women of apostolic times must necessarily
have had their part in these services of love. In addition to the
diaconate appointed by the apostles recorded in the sixth chapter of
Acts, we must look for a female diaconate as an office in the Church.
This we do not fail to find. In Rom. xvi, 1, we read: "I commend unto
you Phebe, a deacon of the church which is at Cenchrea." Such at least
would have been the form of the verse if our translators had rendered
the Greek word here translated servant as they rendered the like word in
the sixth chapter of Acts, the third of the First Epistle to Timothy,
and in other passages of the apostolic writings.

"That ye receive her in the Lord as becometh saints, and that ye assist
her in whatsoever business she hath need of you: for she hath been a
succorer of many, and of myself also." These words of St. Paul are
especially valuable as an apostolic witness for the existence of the
office of deaconess at the time when he wrote. They are even more than
that. They are an apostolic commendation of the office addressed to the
Christian Church of all times to accept the deaconess in the Lord, and
to assist her "in whatsoever business she hath need of you."

Whether Priscilla, spoken of with Aquila as "my helpers in Christ
Jesus," or Tryphena, Tryphosa, and the beloved Persis, who "labored
much," or Julia and Olympas, all mentioned in the same chapter, were or
were not deaconesses we have no means of knowing.

Outside of this chapter we do not find other references to the order in
the New Testament, unless it be in 1 Tim. iii, 11. In the midst of a
lengthy description of the qualifications of deacons is interjected the
exhortation: "Even so must their wives be grave, n