ails
helps us to understand that "deaconesses are needed for many purposes"
(Book ii, chapter xv). The deaconess was ordained to her work, as is
attested by a great number of authorities.[8] "It was because men felt
still that the Holy Ghost alone could give power to do any work to God's
glory that they deemed themselves constrained to ask such power of him,
in setting a woman to do Church service."[9]

The following beautiful prayer of ordination, attributed to the apostle
Bartholomew, bears within it certain proofs of the very early existence
of the ceremony, as well as of the order of deaconesses:

"Eternal God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of man and women,
who didst fill Miriam and Deborah and Hannah and Huldah with thy Spirit,
and didst not disdain to suffer thine only-begotten Son to be born of a
woman; who also in the tabernacle and temple didst appoint woman-keepers
of thine holy gates, look down now upon this thine handmaid, who is
designated to the office of deaconess, and cleanse her from all
filthiness of the flesh and of the spirit, that she may worthily execute
the work intrusted to her to thine honor, and to the praise of thine
Anointed, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honor and adoration
forever. Amen."

The allusion to the creation of man and woman, to the women in the Old
Testament who were called to special service, as well as to Mary, the
mother of the Lord, while no reference is made to the women of the
apostolic Church who were so highly commended, and held in veneration as
worthy of all imitation, go to prove that the origin of this prayer was
so near the time of the apostles as to be almost contemporary with them.

The office of the deaconess, as described by the _Apostolic
Constitutions_, fitted into the needs of the Eastern Church and the
requirements of Greek life. It was in the East that the diaconate of
women originated, and here that it attained its greatest growth. In the
West custom did not demand the careful separation of the sexes as in the
East, and church relations were less bound by social usages;
consequently we meet with fewer references to deaconesses in the works
of the Latin fathers, and the diaconate of women is not so deeply rooted
in the affections of the church communities as we have found it in the
Greek Church.[10]

The fourth century was the blossoming period of woman's diaconate, when
it attained its highest importance. All the leading Greek f