MOTHER 
 
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 | Mother« 
 r in the«~< 
 - Church 
 
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 The Mother in the Church. 
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 By LUCY RIDER SESER, Chicago. 
 ececeececcececcecececcecccecececeeceeed! 
 
 In a phrase of striking beauty and suggestiveness, Paul calls 
 the Church ‘‘the household of faith.’”” Wemay well study the 
 comparison. Like the family the Church has its adult members 
 and its little children, its strong and its weak, its robust and its 
 -ailing ones. The pastor, set apart officially to minister in doc- 
 trine and discipline, stands for the father. The laity, with its 
 numerous auxiliary organizations composed of men and women, 
 may well correspond to the older brothers and sisters. But— 
 where is the mother? The Roman Catholic Church has felt so 
 deeply the need of the feminine element in its organization that 
 for nearly a thousand years it has denied its pastors the right of 
 literal fatherhood that they may ideally be both father and 
 mother tothe flock. The gift to the Roman Church of the Virgin 
 Mary herself, deified increasingly in these later centuries, has 
 been in farsighted response to the same ever-recurring demand. 
 But Protestants understand how worse than useless are these_ 
 unnatural make shifts. Our ideal, were we forced to give enough 
 thought to the subject to formulate an ideal, is that the perfect 
 | pastor, unrestrained in the social and family relations which go 
 | to make up perfect manhood, unites in himself the qualities of | 
 /an entire humanity— —feminine as well as masculine. But there 
 | are two reasons why this ideal can never be realized. The (first) 
 |is found in the very constitution of a man, by which he is una- 
 dapted, mentally and spiritually, for much of the work of ‘‘the 
 | household of faith;’’ and the second) appears in the artificial 
 limitations placed upon every pastor—the social restrictions that / 
 |bind him, and, above all, the unwritten law which, with rare 
 exceptions, places only one mar at the head of a parish, no mat; 
 ‘ter if that parish numbers tens of thousands. * Nor can it be 
 ‘successfully maintained that woman’s helpful but necessarily 
 limited activity in unofficial lines supplies the needs of the 
 mother in the Church, even though this activity is a matter of 
 
 *The school census of 1896 shows a population of ninety thousand 
 people within a radius of eight blocks from Halsted Street Methodist Epis- 
 copal Church, in Chicago. 
 
 1 
 
 rz aE ao el 
 
grateful comment the world over. For, if so, then the converse 
 would hold, that because of the assistance of our stewards, 
 trustees, class leaders and Sunday-school superintendents, who 
 _are usually men, we do not need the pastor. 
 
 There are two. chief sources from which we may hope to know 
 (God’s will touching the fundamental needs of mankind—the 
 Scriptures and that other great book, the human heart as it is 
 revealed in the social conditions about us, What, first, has the 
 Bible to tell us of the work of woman in the early Church? The 
 record is fragmentary, but it is suggestive. The first hint of 
 formal Church organization, aside from the apostolic college, 
 was the appointment of the seven deacons. The occasion was 
 the murmuring of the Grecian Jews ‘‘ because their widows were 
 neglected in the daily ministrations.’’ These ‘‘widows” are 
 popularly supposed to have been pensioners on the Church, and 
 we frankly concede that the weight of authority is in favor of 
 this view. But no less a scholar than Dean J. S. Howson, the 
 well-known co-author with Conybeare of the standard Life of 
 St. Paul, contends earnestly that such an understanding is not 
 in accord with the spirit of the Church at that time.t He main- 
 tains that we have here rather the first germs of that organiza- 
 tion of almsgiving widows, or deaconesses, so well known in the 
 later Church; and that these women received the bounty of the 
 Church, not to expend it upon themselves, but to bestow it upon 
 the poor about them; that even at this early time there began to - 
 flow through woman’s hands those streams of beneficence which 
 were so marked a characteristic of the early Church.{ And, in 
 proof of this, we notice Paul’s direction concerning ‘“‘ widows” 
 in I Tim. v. 9, Io, ‘‘ Let not a widow be taken into the number 
 under threescore years old, . . . well reported of for good 
 works; if she have brought up children, if she have lodged 
 strangers, if she have washed the saints’ feet, if she have relieved 
 the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work.” 
 These widows are commonly credited with having all been alms- 
 receivers, but the authorities are not few who believe that many 
 among them were deaconesses.§ In incidental confirmation of 
 this theory we have the fact that the deaconesses of the early 
 
 t+ Dean Howson says, in Evidenttal Value of the Acts of the Apostles: **For 
 my part laminclined to think that*the widows’ were . . . enrolled, 
 not for the receiving of relief, but for the administration of relief. Itis 
 remarkable that the first organization of the deacons, the earliest named 
 part of the establishment of a Christian ministry, arose out of questions 
 of practicalcharity. If the suggestion I have ventured to make is a sound 
 one, the very earliest ministry inthe Church of Christ, under the apostles, 
 was a ministry of women for the exercise of sympathetic help.” 
 
 + See Uhlhorn’s Christian Charity in the Ancient Church. 
 
 § The word kataheyéoOw (1 Tim. v. 9) means not loosely “taken into the 
 number,” as in the Anthorized Version, but **enrolled,” asin the Revised 
 
 2 
 
Church were at first always chosen from among the ‘“‘ widows ”’ 
 and were always over threescore years of age. It is worth while 
 to notice, also, in this connection, that it is now generally agreed 
 that the yuvaixas of 1 Tim. iii, 11, does not mean ‘ wives.’’ 
 Chrysostom says of this passage that it means, not women in 
 general, but deaconesses. Jerome, looking back to the deacons 
 just preceding, translates it ‘‘ mu/ieres similiter.’’ And following 
 many modern authorities also, there is good ground for believ- 
 ing thet Paul had in mind here, not the women in general of the 
 Church, but the women of the Church who corresponded to the 
 deacons of tbe verses preceding. 
 
 But, dismissing these ‘‘ widows ’’—and we speak of them not 
 so much argumentatively as suggestively—the Phcebe of Rom. 
 xvi, I, has a strong claim to recognition asa deaconess. Ancient 
 scholarship accorded her the office unhesitatingly, and modern 
 scholarship has struggled with its conservatism until she has at 
 last been named a ‘‘ deaconess ” outright in the margin of the 
 Revised Version. And it cannot be denied that in the Church of 
 the second,* third and fourth centuries deaconesses, or helpin 
 widows, were very numerous and very active. They occupie 
 an official position,= and were the counterpart of the dea- 
 con.t They were even ordained,§ or at least set apart to their 
 Version. There may have been a more careful enrollment from the list of 
 the widows. Notice the reading preferred by the American revisers for the 
 verses following, wherein the younger widows were refused because they 
 may reject their first pledge. Some widows doubtless were alms-receivers, 
 but how unlikely that the women of this “*number’’ who had houses and 
 lands for the exercise of a wide hospitality and other good works, with 
 children now grown who would surely, according to apostolic direction, 
 support them—how unlikely that such women, a whole class of them, 
 should become pensioners on the Church. How much more likely that 
 they were women who, by these very characteristics and this very training, 
 were now recognized as qualified to become the almoners to others of the 
 bounty of the Church. 
 
 A curious variation of the Arabic Version isto the point here. That 
 version says boldly, “If a widow be chosen a deacon.” 
 
 *Pliny,inaletterto Trajan, about A. D. 109, asks about the “dua an- 
 cille” that are called “ ministra.” The class was evidently known assuch, 
 since Pliny gives it the technical explanatory designation. 
 
 tIn the Oriental Churches the deaconess undoubtedly belonged to the 
 clergy.—Usihorn'’s Christian Charity in the Ancient Church. 
 
 t This appears constantly in the literature of the early Church. ‘H 
 didxovos stands side by side with 0 didxovos in the Apostolic Constitutions and 
 in the writings of the Church fathers whenever both classes are mentioned. 
 The same form of words are used for the ordaining or setting apart of 
 deacons anddeaconesses. The functions of the two differed, however. The 
 work of the deaconess was much with her own sex, and was less public 
 than that of the deacon. 
 
 One form of the word, didxovos, was at first used for both genders. The 
 feminine form, dtaxd vooa, came intonse later. The English Bishop Brown 
 
 is authority for the statement that didxovos is never applied in the secular 
 sense to woman. 
 $The Apostolic Constitutions say, ‘“* Touching the deaconesses, I, Bar- 
 
 3 
 
 423445 
 
office by the imposition of hands and by prayer.|| Chrysostom, 
 the ‘‘golden-mouthed’’ bishop of Constantinople, was pro- 
 foundly impressed with the value of the work of deaconesses,** 
 and numbered among them trusted advisers and personal friends. 
 The story of his friendship with Olympias, a woman of ‘‘ exqui- 
 site beauty ’’ and noble birth, who had given not only herself, 
 but her vast fortune to the diaconate, has often been told.tt 
 
 It is not to the purpose, however, to tracein detail the history 
 of woman’s diaconate in the early Church, its wide scope, and 
 later decay. It is enough to show, as has been done, that prob- 
 ably in the time of the apostles and certainly in the years imme- 
 diately following, when the Church, still directly under apos- 
 tolic influence, was slowly crystallizing into organized form, the 
 place of woman as an officer in tbe Church was clearly recog- 
 nized and authorized. And that notwithstanding her exceedingly 
 circumscribed social position. 
 
 Let us now turn from God’s written will to those conditions 
 of human society in whose significant undertone we hear his 
 voice speaking to his Church and saying: ‘‘In these needs also 
 find your call toservice. Let the empty mouths and the half- 
 clad bodies of the poor, let the starving souls of the rich whom 
 you tever reach with your preached Gospel, let the moans of the 
 uncared-for sick and dying and the needs of friendless children 
 be as the voice of the Son of man pleading with you for relief.’’ 
 In the light of such a call can we not see how pitiable is our in- 
 adequacy? The question resolves itself into simply this: Can 
 the Church as at present organized—excluding the deaconess 
 movement, which is hardly yet an appreciable force in our 
 midst—meet all the demands of society that it ought to meet? 
 
 tholomew, do thus ordain: O bishop, thou shalt lay on her thy hands in 
 the presence of the presbytery, of the deacons and deaconesses, and thou 
 shalt say, ‘Oeternal God,’’’etc. But her duties are limited. She must not 
 “ bless”’ (pronounce the benediction), and must not baptize; for “* to ordain 
 female priests would be pagan.’ 
 
 A canon of the Nicene Council (A. D. 326) ordained deaconesses in the 
 Church. Western gatherings of the Church from A. D. 440 on, including 
 the Synod of Orange and the Council of Orleans, forbid the ordaining of 
 any more “‘ widows who are called deaconesses.”’ 
 
 ||This is not stated to broach in any way a disquieting claim to similar 
 recogn tion in modern times, but simply as a curious fact of history. The 
 laying on of hands seems not to have been as formal and technical an act 
 in ancient times as it has since become. Doubtless the acts of ordination 
 and benediction shaded into each other. 
 
 ** Speaking of Ph cebe (Rom. xvi, 1), Chrysostom says: ‘‘See how many 
 ways he[Paul] takes to give her dignity. Forhe has both mentioned her 
 before the rest and called her sister. It is no mean thing to becalled a 
 sister of Paul. Moreover, he has added to her rank by mentioning her be- 
 ing adeaconess. Paul places on each side this blessed woman her praises.”’ 
 —Homilies on Romans. 
 
 +t Seventeen of the two hundred and forty-two letters of Chrysostom 
 still extant are addressed to Olympias. 
 
 4 
 
LUCY RIDER MEYER 
 
 5 
 
- 
 
 Let it be distinctly understood that the efficiency of the Gospel 
 message is not questioned here, but only the present sufficiency 
 and adaptability of the means for conveying that message. And 
 it is contended that there isan urgent need, not only of the admin- 
 istrative and teaching ministry of men, supplemented by such 
 social and physical ministry as they may be able to give, but 
 also of the characteristic ministry of women. 
 
 We may look, for instance, at the need among children. The 
 eminent French philanthropist, M. Georges Bonjean, made the 
 astounding assertion ‘some years ago that according to careful 
 calculation there were in France one hundred thousand children, 
 between the ages of twelve and sixteen, who were outcast or 
 youthful criminais* (‘‘abandonnes ou coupables”). . It makes 
 the brain reel and the heart swell to bursting to think of what 
 underlies this condition, of the vast mass of slum-born suffering 
 babyhood that makes possible this great army of a hundred 
 thousand outcast youth. The better moral and industrial con- 
 ditions of America prevent our statistics from rising to such 
 frightful heights, but every thoughtful student of the situation 
 knows that there are hundreds and thousands of outcast or 
 abandoned children in the United States. They are in our poor- 
 houses, or absolutely unsheltered and unmothered on our city 
 streets. And has the Church of God no responsibility concern- 
 ing these little ones? Has it forgotten that childhood is God’s 
 special time of opportunity for inculcating religious truth? We 
 mourn over the obduracy of the adult sinner and train all our 
 strong batteries of argument and effort to heat down the hard walls 
 of his habitand prejudice, while we neglect the low swinging por- 
 tal of the heart of the child, ready to yield at the gentlest touch. 
 But as the Church is now organized, with its unofficial women 
 members occupied so largely with social duties or blessedly busy 
 with family cares, can it do more than the most fragmentary 
 work for orphan and needy children? According toour last Year 
 Book, itis taking the efforts and contributions of almost three 
 thousand of our Church members to care for one orphan child.’’+ 
 
 But look in another direction, at the tens of thousands of not 
 entirely abandoned but criminally neglected children. The 
 evangel of the public school is doing much for the general intel- 
 ligence of its pupils, but there are hundreds of thousands of chil- 
 dren in the great cities of the United States not reached at all by 
 the public school. For instance, a study of the school census of 
 
 * Quoted in leaflet by the late Pastor Hocart, calling attention to the 
 work of his daughter’s ‘‘ Maison des Enfants,’ 31 Rue de Corneille, Levalois- 
 Perret, pres Paris. 
 
 } There are 1,020 children listed in the Year Book as the average attend- 
 ancein our children’s homes aud orphauages—pp. 105-111. But our total 
 lay membership in the United States is 2,716,652. See page 33 of Year Book. 
 
 6 
 
the city of Chicago reveals some startling facts. In the twenty- 
 four central wards of that city there were, by the census of 1898, 
 242,780 children of school age—that is, between six and fourteen. 
 According to the report of the Board of Education there were at 
 that time only 114,665 sittings in the public school] buildings of 
 these twenty-four wards; less than half that of the number of 
 school childreny Allowing 50,000 for children who may have 
 been attending private and parochial schools, and for those en- 
 joying the partial relief of half-day sessions—and this estimate is 
 a liberal one—it still remains true that there were more than 
 75,000 children in the heart of the second greatest city of our 
 land who were not in any school whatever.t 
 
 But what of the moral and spiritual training of even that part 
 of the children who are in the public school? The government 
 of Mexico, though it represents a reaction against the most com- 
 mon form of religion in that country, has put into its public 
 schools an excellent text-book on ethics; but there is no required 
 ethical teaching in the United States. Maultitudes of children in 
 our public schools are never found in any place of religious 
 teaching. They never hear a prayer, and are in sucb ignorance 
 of the bare historical facts of Christianity that it is easy to cite 
 case after case where even the names of God have been known 
 only as convenient bywords—blasphemy itself condoned by 
 ignorance. 
 
 Moreover, what as to the industrial and social future of these 
 children? Occasionally an exceptionally advanced public school 
 touches the border of ‘‘ manual training ’’—teaches a boy to drive 
 a nail and a girl to sew a seam—but not one gives them a trade. 
 Our Trades Unions make the old-fashioned apprenticeship next 
 to impossible. Our few manual training schools are far too ex- 
 pensive for the many, not to speak of the further complicating 
 fact that the almost exclusive division of labor into ‘‘ piece 
 work ”’ is greatly lessening the possibility that even the boy who 
 has a trade will be able to earn a living by it. How are these 
 children of the slums going to learn how to earn a respectable 
 livelihood when the time comes that they must shift for them- 
 selves? Has the Church of God no responsibility in this matter? 
 Has it no golden opportunity? What if it has not yet fully 
 thought through the problem, shall it withhold a present, 
 practical help, even if partial, because it cannot make a theory 
 of perfect eventual relief? Shall it hesitate as to its own plain 
 duty while speculating as to what the State ought todo? What 
 if teaching the industries and feeding the hungry is not the 
 highest function of the Church? Jesus Christ fed the hungry in 
 emergencies. The apostolic church fed the hungry in emer- 
 
 t For this statistical study the author is indebted to Dr. W. E. McLen- 
 nan, pastor of Trinity Church, Chicago. 
 
 7 
 
gencies. Perhaps the profoundest impression upon society 
 made by the early Church was because of its feeding the hungry 
 and clothing the naked.§ And is there not an emergency now? 
 Let it be conceded that it is the State that should be charged 
 with the duty of giving her children such a start in life that with 
 honest labor they may gain at least a respectable living; the fact 
 is the State is not doing it. Moreover, tillthere shall be wrought 
 a vast change of public sentiment on this subject, the State can- 
 not do it. It has not the buildings, it has not the money to pay 
 teachers. But the Church has hundreds of millions of dollars’ 
 worth of magnificent buildings, used now but six or eight hours 
 aweek. It hasa great body of women, unemployed, or inade- 
 quately employed, who, once their eyes were opened to the need 
 of such work, would volunteer to doit. Ought it not to throw 
 open its buildings and establish and operate a thousand indus- 
 trial schools, where cooking, and dressmaking, and housekeep- 
 ing shall be so thoroughly taught to the girl of ten or twelve 
 that she shall not at fourteen or fifteen be driven into the ‘‘ ways 
 that take hold on hell’’ by the bay of the gray wolf of starvation 
 at her heels? And schools where boys may learn to use their 
 hands in such a way that in the swift-coming years they may 
 not be forced into the life of a criminal for lack of food to eat?* 
 And especially since the prosecution of this work opens up 
 the most admirable opportunities for the molding of character 
 and furthering of spiritual development. 
 
 But look at still another great class of needs: those, physical 
 and spiritual, when the body is laid low by sickness. Only 
 within the last few years, and largely because of the sentiment 
 which our few deaconesses have created, has the modern Church 
 so much as recognized that it had the slightest responsibility in 
 this matter. The early Church, with its great ‘‘ hospices,’’ was 
 not so blind. Our Lord’s command was not only ‘* Preach the 
 Gospel,” but ‘‘Heal the sick.”+ What a painfully imperfect 
 understanding is that which makes it the duty of all ages to 
 preach the Gospel, yet practically declares the duty of healing 
 
 § Julian the apostate, speaking of the ‘‘ Galileans,”’ tells us that by their 
 charity to the poor they “‘ begot the greatest admiration for their religion 
 in the minds of men.’? He even urged systematic efforts among heathen for 
 the relief of poverty, declaring, ‘‘It is disgraceful, when there is not a beg- 
 gar found among the Jews, and when the godless Galileaus support our 
 poor as their own, that our people should be without our help.”—Sozomen 
 Ec. Hist., v, 16. 
 
 * Said a New York Judge of the Supreme Court a few years ago, **There 
 is a large class—I was about to say a majority—of the population of New 
 York and Brooklyn who just live, and to whom the rearing of two or more 
 children means inevitabiy a boy for the penitentiary and a girl for the 
 brothel.”—Henry George's Social Preblems, p.98. Quoted by Josiah Strong 
 in Our Country. 
 
 t Matt. x, 7, 8;. Luke ix, 2; x, 9. 
 
the sick to have ceased with the miraculous gifts of the apostolic 
 age. Illness, like childhood, is a God-given opportunity for 
 religious influence. When flesh and heart grow weak and hands 
 are stretched out for help in mortal agony, when dear ones are 
 passing into the vast unknown and solemn thoughts. of the life 
 hereafter are forced upon the mind, or when long days of conva- 
 lescence come and there is ‘‘nothing to do but think,” then 
 words concerning Jesus, aud siv, and heaven are seed falling 
 into good ground. Do we not owe it to the world that wherever - 
 trembling hands are stretched out, groping in the dark, some 
 agent of the Church be there, some representative of Jesus Christ, 
 with comfort and help? If we were wise to see and seize these 
 opportunities, if we had trained, tactful servants of the Church 
 ready to take advantage of them, we might in the first decade of 
 the century just dawning win half the world for Christ. Yet the 
 Cburch can never seriously undertake to care for the sick with- 
 out the help of the official women. None other will have at her 
 command uninterrupted time for such service, and none other 
 will have the requisite skill, for this helper must be technically 
 trained. 
 
 With the thought of the modern world’s great need in mind 
 we may well turn again for a moment to the history of woman’s 
 diaconate. It never lapsed entirely; the organized, authorized 
 work of women was too vital to the well-being of the Church to 
 permit the loss of the idea. Underneath the perverted forms of 
 the Roman Catholic Church we find it still struggling for exis- 
 tence. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it broke out ina 
 most interesting and curious movement—little companies of 
 pious women, the Beguines, lightly bound by rules, devoting 
 themselves to works of mercy, the care of children and the sick. 
 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the corruption and 
 decay of these Beguines, but the rise of the ‘‘ Sisters of Common 
 Life,’’ whose work was also largely objective. But in the seven- 
 teenth century, in the founding by Vincent de Paul of the order 
 of the ‘‘ Sisters of Charity,’’ the Roman Church most nearly ap- 
 proached the diaconate of the early times. Vincent de Paul was 
 its Fliedner. To him that Church is very largely indebted for 
 practical methods of organizing women, not for the cloister but 
 for objective benevolent work. 
 
 The women in various branches of this order in the early 
 days were not nuns; they were not bound by lifelong vows. 
 They were free to come and go as needed. The beautiful direc- 
 tions of Vincent de Paul are still extant, ‘‘ Your convent must be | 
 the home of the sick; your cell the chamber of suffering; your 
 chapel the parish church; your cloister the streets of the city or 
 the wards of the hospital; your rule the general vow of obedi- 
 ence; your grille the fear of God; your veil, to shut out the 
 
 9 
 
world, holy modesty.’’ But the rules of this and similar orders 
 
 hardly waited their founder’s death to be modified in harmony 
 with the monastic spirit, when very much less of liberty was 
 allowed. Vows were made burdensome, and obligations to for- 
 mal devotions at very frequent intervals interfered greatly with 
 practical work. This is true also of the multitudinous Roman 
 orders of women at the present time. While woman’s activities 
 in the Roman Church have undoubtedly deeply influenced 
 Protestantism we do not find there at any time the true diaconate 
 of woman. 
 
 It is exceedingly interesting to observe, in certain reforma- 
 tory movements of the Church before the Reformation proper, 
 attempts to reinstate the Early Church diaconate of women. 
 The Waldenses in France, the Moravians in Bohemia, and the 
 Mennonites in the Netherlands endeavored to reinstate isolated 
 deaconesses in their congregations. There was, however, no 
 endeavor to connect with these efforts that which history would 
 seem to show to be essential to permanency and success—the 
 sisterhood life, and the attempts are principally interesting as 
 showing the persistence of the idea. Luther took no energetic 
 steps toward the retention of sisterhoods in the Reformed 
 Church,* but there is no lack of testimony from him as to his 
 recognition of the value of woman’s religious work, and even 
 of that work carried on through sisterhoods, free, of course, from 
 the compulsions and corruptions only too common in Romanism.t+ 
 There was, however, so much well-founded dread in Protestant- 
 ism of the convent system as illustrated in the Roman Church, 
 that all that was done for centuries to reinstate the diaconate of 
 women was some feeble attempt here and there to appoint a 
 congregational deaconess, notably in the congregations of the 
 Puritans and in the Reformed Church of Germany. It remained 
 for the good Lutheran pastor, Theodore Fliedner, to bring about 
 in Germany, in the first half of the nineteenth century the true 
 
 * But Luther wrote, in 1532, to the senate of the city of Herford, which 
 was planning to abolish its convents: ‘*Inasmuch as these. . . sisters 
 lead an honest life, and have an honorable, well-conducted community, 
 moreover as they faithfully honor and obey the pure doctrine, it is mv 
 friendly petition that . .. you will allow them to wear their clerical habit 
 and practice all praiseworthy customs. For such convents please me 
 beyond measure.” 
 
 t+ The election of the seven (Acts vi.) and the remembrance of the char- 
 itable work of the Church could not fail to direct Luther’s attention to the 
 diaconate. He says, ‘“‘ It were well, it we had the right kind of people to 
 begin it, that the city be divided into four or five parts, and each part be 
 assigned a pastor and several deacons, who would supply that district with 
 preaching and almsgiving, visiting the sick, etc.” Here the entire province 
 of the diaconate, as a personal office for rendering bodily and spiritual aid, 
 is placed besi¢e that of the ministry. Had such an arrangement been prac- 
 ticable, Christian women would have undoubtedly found their place in it. 
 —Emil Wacker, in The Deaconess Calling. 
 
 10 
 
renaissance of the office of deaconess. He saw, as did no other 
 of his times, the possibilities of the organized work of Christian 
 women. The social status of women in Germany sixty years ago, 
 the conservatism of our Teutonic cousins, and lower moral plane 
 of the Lutheran Church in Germany—which for instance, evento 
 this date permits the Kaiserswerth work to be aided by great lot- 
 teries carried on under the ‘‘mother house’’ roof—made it 
 inevitable that the work of the Fliedner deaconesses, judged by 
 American standards, should be limited. Even at the present 
 time, though their number has increased amazingly and their 
 influerce in philanthropy has been immense, yet we find 
 Lutheran deaconesses mostly as nurses and as caretakers in 
 orphanages and reformatories. But it is to be gratefully noted 
 not only that Fliedner brought into the modern world a workable 
 plan for a Protestant sisterhood, but that our present splendid 
 system of nurses’ training schools, the civilized world over, 
 originated directly in his effort to train Christian women to care 
 for the sick. For Florence Nightingale and Agnes Jones drew 
 not only their skill, but to a large extent their inspiration, from 
 Kaiserswerth. tL 
 
 But the deaconess movement in American Methodism is strik- 
 ingly spontaneous. It is not a growth from the German root. 
 Its workers bear the same name as those in Germany, and do in 
 some respects a similar work, but it originated independently 
 and on a far broader and more evangelistic basis. About the 
 time Fliedner was founding his deaconess ‘‘ mother house’”’ in 
 Germany the women in England and America were organizing 
 their missionary ‘‘ Female Prayer Meetings,’’ and one-third of a 
 century later the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society in the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church was struck out of the hearts of 
 women white-hot with love and pity for the woes of their heathen 
 sisters. A decade later the undenominational Woman’s Christian 
 Temperance Union was organized, affecting all classes, but 
 Methodism very deeply. Then came the Woman’s Home Mis- 
 sionary Society in Methodism, born out of a great desire to help 
 the ignorant and godless of our own land. Women were not 
 only going forward to meet their share of the responsibilities of 
 a lost world, but they were rapidly learning wisdom. They were 
 perceiving the tremendous advantages of organization. Allthese 
 movements were prophetic of the organic innovation coming to 
 the Church in the aptly-named Deaconess Movement. 
 
 There was established in Chicago, in 1885, a date which Dr. 
 Abel Stevens says ‘‘ will hereafter be commemorated as an his- 
 toricai epoch in American Methodism,’’ { the first center in the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church to which women believing them- 
 
 + Central Christian Advocate, 1893. 
 11 
 
selves called of God for special religious work could gather and 
 in which they could receive preparation for that work. It soon 
 became also a meeting place for missionaries, and an institution 
 in which women not intending to enter any mission field might 
 nevertheless study the Bible and social problems. The sponta- 
 neity of the movement is strikingly illustrated by the fact that 
 this institution, the Chicago Training School for City, Home and 
 Foreign Missions, was established not in connection with any 
 society,§ but by the personal efforts of a few individuals. It was, 
 however, promptly recognized by the Annual Conference within 
 whose territory it was established. Two years later the deacon- 
 ess work proper of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America 
 had its first informal beginnings in the Chicago Training School. 
 With the preparation and oncoming of companies of women, 
 and the increasingly loud call from the great city in the midst of 
 which the school was located, the result was inevitable. Here 
 was the need, here was the means to meet the need ; they could 
 not fail to come together. It was as if God had opened a door 
 and thrust one through it. Not till months afterward did the 
 founders of the work in America learn that the effort in the 
 United States was closely akin to the work of the Lutheran dea- 
 conesses across the water, and that there was in existence in that 
 country a little nucleus of Methodist deaconesses. For those 
 German Methodist deaconesses, while intensely evangelical, 
 were very naturally patterning closely after the Lutheran sisters 
 in organization and work, and they had not then become an 
 _appreciable force in Methodism. 
 
 The first deaconess institution in American Methodism* was 
 the Chicago Deaconess Home, established in the building of the 
 Chicago Training School in June, 1887. It received the recog- 
 nition of the Rock River Annual Conference, in which Chicago 
 is located, a few months later. It attracted much attention. 
 After nearly a year of successful operation a memorial concern- 
 ing it went up to the General Conference of 1888. It fell into 
 the hands of Dr.—now Bishop—Thoburn, who for years had 
 been planning for some kind of a sisterhood to reinforce mission 
 work among women in India, and now he came bringing also a 
 memorial, from the Bengal Conference, looking to this object. 
 
 § The Woman’s Foreign and the Womau’s Home Missionary Societies 
 were both informally represented in the first committees of the Training 
 School, ladies being asked to serve who were known to be active in these 
 societies. The school had not been in existence a month before both soci- 
 ties formally recommendedit. It has, moreover, from time to time received 
 small douations from bothsocieties. But it is, and always has been, organ- 
 ically independent of any organization but the Church itself. 
 
 * The limits of this article do not permit mention of the much smaller 
 work of the Protestant Episcopal and the Lutheran deaconessesin America. 
 
 12 
 
To the Missionary Committee, of which Dr. Thoburn was chair- 
 man, this memorial and the one from Chicago were referred, and 
 it was largely by the doctor’s earnest advocacy that favorable 
 legislation was secured. In the General Conference of I900 the 
 paragraphs ‘‘ On Deaconesses” were recast, and adopted as they 
 now appear in the present Discipline. No formal definition of a 
 deaconess is given, but all the characteristics which had been 
 stamped upon the deaconess in the spontaneous development of 
 the movement are therein recognized. _ She is a trained free vol- 
 unteer, usually living in an institution. She is unsalaried, but 
 ‘‘entitled to support.’’ She is licensed aad ‘‘ consecrated’”’ by 
 the authorities of the Church. She is bound by no vows. Her 
 preparatory course of study is by no means nominal. It is nearly 
 always taken in a training school. When consecrated she be- 
 comes a Church officer. The bishop, in the beautiful Consecra- 
 tion Service, takes her by the hand and says, ‘‘I admit thee to 
 the office.’”” Whether in or out of institutions she is directly 
 under the care of the Board of Bishops, which has become a 
 ** General Deaconess Board ’’ for ‘‘ general supervision over all 
 deaconess work throughout the Church.’”’ The Annual Confer- 
 ence ‘‘ Deaconess Boards,’’ however, have certain responsibili- 
 ties, chief among which is the granting of the license of the 
 deaconess. The approval of the Conference itself must be given 
 every year for the continuance of the deaconess in office, re- 
 minding one of the ‘‘ passing of character’’ of the deacons. 
 Transfers to and from Annual Conferences must be made with 
 the approval of the District Bishops. Deaconesses in institu- 
 tions are under the immediate direction of the superintendent of 
 the institution 
 
 Once given ecclesiastical recognition the deaconess move- 
 ment immediately entered upon a period of development so 
 rapid that it has been difficult to supply it with the necessary 
 workers. In December, 1888, the second home was established, 
 the great Gamble Home—and, later, Hospital—in Cincinnati. 
 The year 1889 was marked by the opening of deaconess homes 
 in New York, Boston and Minneapolis. Wesley Hospital was 
 organized in Chicago, the first in America under deaconess 
 auspices. It was in this year also that the Woman’s Home Mis- 
 sionary Society, at its annual meeting in November, resolved to 
 combine with its growing activities, methods of deaconess work.+ 
 
 t This society held from the first the ideal of training for its employes. 
 But the four most characteristic features of a deaconess—namely, that she 
 is (1) unsalaried, (2) costumed, (3) adopts usually the community life, and 
 especially (4) that she is by her license and consecration recognized as an 
 officer in the Church—had their providential rise in American Methodism 
 in the work started in Chicago, June, 1887, and were now for the first time 
 adopted by the Woman’s Home Missionary Society for its workers. 
 
 13 
 
The first home under the auspices of this society was opened in 
 
 Detroit in January, 1890. 
 
 At the present time there are about eighty centers t of dea- 
 coness work in the United States, including three Orphanages 
 and Children’s Homes, three Old People’s Homes, and seventeen 
 Hospitals. There are, including probationers, about eight 
 hundred women devoting themselves to this work, Including 
 the three hundred Methodist deaconesses of Germany and the 
 sixty in foreign mission fields, for which this kind of work is 
 admirably adapted, there are eleven hundred and sixty deacon- 
 esses and probationers in the Methodist Episcopal Church.|| 
 The German Methodists in America have taken up the work with 
 enthusiasm, giving this branch of the work a strong impulse 
 toward the ‘‘mother-house”’ idea, as is the case with all the 
 work in Germany. 
 
 “The most characteristic feature of deaconess work in Ameri- 
 can Methodism is its spontaneity. Though greatly aided and 
 strengthened by its recognition by the General Conference it did 
 not originate with that body. The women themselves had inau- 
 gurated the work, had mastered the initial difficulties, and had 
 carried on the work almost a year before General Conference 
 recognition. That recognition was, indeed, almost wholly be- 
 cause of the work. The real origin of the work in America was, 
 
 ‘her-instinct of woman herself, and in that wider con- 
 
 - woman’s ‘‘family duties ” that compels her to include 
 
 ving care the great needy world-family as well as the 
 
 _.. .ttle domestic circle. And the development of the work 
 
 is satisfactory and expansive just in proportion as in its details 
 
 and responsibilities it is laid directly on the hearts and hands 
 of the deaconesses themselves.* 
 
 As to the character of the work being done by deaconesses, 
 
 + Reckoning as “‘ceuters”’ places where not less than two deaconesses 
 areat work. About thirty “stations,” places at which a single deaconess 
 is at work, are also scattered throughout the country. 
 
 § Adding the three deaconess hospitals in Germany, at Frankfort-on- 
 Main, Berlin and Hamburg, we havea total of twenty deaconess hospitals 
 in the Methodist Episcopal Church. These hospitals cared for more than 
 ten thousand resident patients last year, with much dispensary and outside 
 work. 
 
 || See Methodist Year Book, 1901, p. 119. 
 
 *In America, in the English-speaking work, nearly all the homes and 
 hospitals have deaconess superintendents, unsalaried, of course, as is the 
 case with all deaconesses. Upon the shoulders of a deaconess rest all the 
 detail work and the full financial responsibility of an orphanage containing 
 more than ninety children. Deaconesses are successfully managing a large 
 hospital in Omaha, which last year cared for eight hundred and ninety- 
 eight patients, and a e collecting money fora great building. Soin scores 
 of similar instances. 
 
 14 
 
the two original ideas in America were the religious visitation of 
 the neglected in great cities and nursing the sick poor in their 
 own homes. But in the rapid development of the movement 
 other work has sought these willing hands. As may be seen by 
 reference to our Year Book, orphanages, hospitals, settlements, 
 homes for the aged, even literary schools—all sorts of helpful 
 institutions—have been established by deaconesses or have been 
 put into their hands by a confident Church or by philanthropic 
 individuals. Literary, enterprises have been undertaken.+ 
 About two million dollars’ worth of property and endowment is 
 now being used in deaconess work. Land, private houses, school 
 and hospital buildings are seeking deaconess ownership quite as 
 fast as deaconesses can be prepared to take wise possession. 
 Among our eleven hundred and sixty deaconesses there are 
 nurses, caretakers of children and the aged, matrons, singers, 
 kindergartners, stenographers, financial agents, physicians, 
 teachers in literary schools, editors, evangelists, and superin- 
 tendents of homes and hospitals. Many women have left lucra- 
 tive positions to devote themselves to this work. Someare using 
 their own private funds to support themselves in it. There is 
 nothing that a Christian woman can do, and that needs to be 
 undertaken in tbe church, which may not be done by the dea- 
 coness. She is free to do anything; she is trained to undertake 
 with courage and devotion whatever may be put into her hands. 
 She has no vow of service, but a loving will that is stronger than 
 vows pledges her to move against the mountain of human sorrow 
 and need, with the assurance tbat it will in God’s good time be 
 removed. 
 
 By far the most urgent need of the Deaconess Movement at 
 present is more workers. In the Roman Church of America 
 alone—including Canada—there are to-day more than sixty 
 thousand Sisters of Mercy,* a very large majority of whom are 
 actively prosecuting the most practical forms of benevolent work, 
 They educate and care for the youth, of whom they have consid- 
 erably more than half a millionin hand. They nurse the sick 
 and aid in all sorts of reformatory work. They have charge of 
 six hundred and ninety-five houses of mercy—hospitals, homes 
 for the aged, orphanages, industrial schools—and are founding 
 new ones almost every day. Their hospitals alone number one 
 hundred and sixty-seven. Honor to them. But does the devo- 
 tion of the women of that Church, where entering a religious 
 
 + A book on Deaconess Work has been written by a deaconess. A 
 monthly periodical with a circulation of about twenty-thousand is sent out 
 by deaconesses. 
 
 * Catholic Directory for 1900. Official. Published by M. H. Wiltzius & 
 Co., Milwatfkee, Wis. 
 
 15 
 
order means so often a living entombment, exceed that of the 
 women of our Church in which to enter this office means a life 
 of free and joyous service for Christ? Wo does not know that 
 The Teal work, the tlhe Work Of The Roman Catholic Church 
 in America has been done very largely by its women? It is 
 their devoted service in hospital and yellow fever camp that has 
 not only gained friends and converts to the Church by scores 
 and thousands, but has created an enormous public sentiment in 
 its favor and brought money by the millions of dollars into its 
 treasuries. It is their quiet but unceasing work with the young 
 that gains adherents by the hundreds of thousands. But the 
 women of Methodism, breathed upon by a wind from heaven, 
 are ‘“‘rising up,’’ ‘‘at ease’’ no longer, and are coming forward 
 to do the same work—nay, a better, purer, more spiritual work 
 for our beloved Church. Nearly eleven hundred volunteers in 
 fourteen years—that is their record. And the number through 
 two quadrenniums has increased at the annual rate of twenty-six 
 percent. Two hundred and fifty thousand religious calls made 
 last year! Twenty thousand religious meetings held with moth- 
 ers and children! A score of hospitals established and in hand, 
 wherein were cared for by Methodist deaconesses last year more 
 than ten thousand patients, not to speak of the half as many 
 more pocr sick ones given loving Christian ministration in their 
 
 wun homes. Do we understand the significance of this already 
 great work? Who can realize what it will mean to Protestantism 
 when the Mother shall bave been fully established again in her 
 place in the Household of Faith? 
 
 From the ‘‘Methodist Review,’ New York, 
 September—October, 1901. 
 
 16 
 
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‘Date Due