nd judicial persecutions, but
continued her works of charity, and outlived the man whose mind and
heart had so influenced hers by eleven years. Chrysostom wrote her many
letters, of which seventeen are extant.[14] They plainly show the
estimate he set upon the diaconate of women, and his endeavor to wisely
cherish it. Unfortunately, they also show exaggeration of compliment and
praise which detract from his words of sincere and honest admiration.
Too often, also, he gives undue value to works of mercy, and exalts acts
of ascetic self-denial.

The question of the age at which deaconesses could be received is a
vexed one. The confusion of apprehension touching deaconesses and widows
led to differing enactments at different times and places. The
restriction of age, however, must now have lost its force, as we find
Olympias a deaconess when not yet twenty years of age, and Makrina, the
sister of Gregory of Nyssa, was ordained when a young girl. Deaconesses
retained control of their property. In truth, a law of the State forbade
them to enrich churches and institutions at the expense of those having
just claims on them. Deaconesses also existed in the Church of Asia
Minor. Ignatius mentions them as at Antioch in Syria. They were in Italy
and Rome. The Church of St. Pudentiana, in the Eternal City, keeps
alive the memory of two deaconesses whose house is said to have stood on
this site; Praxedes and Pudentiana, the daughters of a Roman senator,
who devoted themselves, with all they had, to the service of the Church.
Deaconesses also penetrated to Ireland, Gaul, and Spain, lingering in
the last named country many years after they had passed out of knowledge
elsewhere.

We find very little about this order of Christian workers in the Western
Church. There is a passage of Origen in a Latin translation which speaks
of the ministry of women as both existing and necessary, but in the
great Latin fathers, the contemporaries of Chrysostom, scarcely a
mention occurs. From the last half of the fifth century the diaconate of
women declined in importance.[15] It was deprived of its clerical
character by the decrees passed by the Gallic councils of the fifth and
sixth centuries. It was finally entirely abolished as a church order by
the Synod of Orleans, 593 A.D., which forbade any woman henceforth to
receive the _benedictio diaconalis_, which had been substituted for
_ordinatio diaconalis_ by a previous council (Synod of Orange, 441). T