Discretion and tact are needed in dealing with the different sections of the congregation, and especially in relieving the widows. Care must be taken not to encourage either a rigour not likely to be maintained, or opportunities of idleness certain to lead to mischief. Help is to be generously afforded to the destitute; but the resources of the Church must be jealously guarded. They must not be wasted on the unworthy, or on those who have other means of help. And, so far as possible, the independence of those who are relieved must be protected by employing them in the service of the Church.
In conclusion it may be worth while to point out that this mention of an order of widows is no argument against the Pauline authorship of these Epistles, as if no such thing existed in his time. In Acts vi. 1 the widows appear as a distinct body in the Church at Jerusalem. In Acts ix. 39, 41, they appear almost as an order in the Church at Joppa. They “show the coats and garments which Dorcas made” in a way which seems to imply that it was their business to distribute such things among the needy. Even if it means no more than that Dorcas made them for the relief of the widows themselves, still the step from a body of widows set apart for the reception of alms to an order of widows set apart for the duty of intercessory prayer and ministering to the sick is not a long one, and may easily have been made in St. Paul’s lifetime.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] The Council in Trullo (A.D. 691), the great authority for discipline in the Greek Church, fixed the age of forty for admission to the office of a deaconess and sixty for that of a widow.
[59] In the middle recension of the Ignatian Epistles we read “I salute the keepers of the holy doors, the deaconesses in Christ” (Ant. xii.). “Let the deaconesses stand at the entries of the women” (Apost. Const. ii. 57, 58). “For we stand in need of a woman, a deaconess, for many necessities, and first in the baptism of women,” etc.—(Ib. iii. 15.)
[60] 1 Cor. vii. 1.
[61] Apost. Const., iii. 7.
[62] Apost. Const., vi. 17.
[63] De Virg. Vel., ix.
[64] Smyrn. xiii.