were supposed to be possessed of demons, to care for them, and to "heal them, if possible." "To heal them if possible;" so we have here once more the idea of the healing mission of Christianity. For this may be taken as the real suggestiveness, whatever its accompanying superstitions, of the exorcist's office. Jesus would have the bearers of his gospel, through all ages as we may believe, to be also health-bearers, "to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick." His churches may be storehouses of health-giving power. It may be so undoubtedly in our own age, through hospitals, through the promotion of medical and surgical science alike in Christendom and heathendom, through private ministration. But more than this: moral sanity will promote physical sanity. "The Elder" prayed for his well-beloved son and host: "That in all things thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." And the divine law under which soul and body live and act together will ever give its silent Amen to such a prayer. Strengthen the wavering will, lift up the anxious or grovelling thoughts to have faith in God and to dwell upon whatsoever things are just, true, honorable, pure, lovely, of good report, excellent, praiseworthy-and the whole man will be made strong in this joy of the Lord. Worthy of universal acceptation is the ancient witness, that "gladness of heart is the life of a man," that "envy and wrath shorten a man's days and care bringeth old age before the time." Nor was it a mere sick man's whim, when a sufferer from nervous disorder said: "Prove to me that God loves me, and I will leave this place a well man." While, therefore, the Church in its ministry of healing may not be authorized to say to the sick or diseased, "In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk," it may bring them health through prayer in Jesus Christ's name; and, moreover, by the way of the conscious and regnant soul it may convey healing virtue even to the unconscious bodily organism. In which facts 'Luke ix. 2. 23 John 2. 'Ecclesiasticus, Bk. II., 22. of daily experience may be seen the "psychotherapy" of science and of religion. Of late the question has been raised-and illustrated by several examples-whether it were well that some such service of healing should be recognized and undertaken as one of the organized ministrations of a Christian church.' The reader kept the church's books of Scripture, and read the lessons in congregational worship. And he was needed, whatever may have been true of the exorcist. Not, of course, that it was a new thing to have the Scriptures read to the people. That was a custom that dated from the days of the Apostles, and from far earlier days. It was a part of the order of instruction and worship in the Synagogue. "From generations of old, in every city," the Law was proclaimed, "being read in the synagogues every Sabbath." Our Lord, on at least one Sabbath day, was reader: "He entered, as his custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read." The Apostle Paul bids his young helper, Timothy, to attend to the "reading," and directs that epistles of his own be read in the churches. Justin Martyr tells, in a classic passage, of such reading of the Gospels and the Prophets in his day. But it was not until perhaps a generation after Justin's time that the office of reader was created. Theretofore the reading was probably done by one of the existing office-bearers or by a layman, as might seem expedient. Now it was elevated into a separate and distinct office. Fallows, "Health and Healing," passim. 666 "Acts xv. 21. 'Col. iv. 16; 1 Thess. v. 27. "And on the day called Sunday all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the Apostles [the Gospels] or the writings of the Prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then when the reader has ceased, the president orally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things." ("First Apology." 67.) 'It is first mentioned in patristic literature by Tertullian, incidentally : "And so it comes to pass [among heretics] that to-day one man is their bishop, to-morrow another; to-day he is a deacon who to-morrow is a reader." ("Against Heresies," 41.) And there would seem to have been a call for such an office in the fact that the congregations were not receiving the evangelical instruction that was needful. For the voice of the prophet-preacher was coming to be heard less and less often. Besides, the bishop was in some instances an "unlearned man❞— that is to say, unable to read. So the reader was called forth, and not simply as a reader, but also as an expounder of the Scriptures, taking, in fact, the vacated place of the evangelist. At his ordination it was hoped and prayed for that he might prove to be a prophetic teacher.' And so he did, let us believe, in some instances at least. But ere long the Scripture-reading degenerated into the merest perfunctory performance; for in the devitalized atmosphere of an ever-increasing sacerdotalism the living voice of truth sickened and ceased." The doorkeeper had the keys of the church edifice formally put into his hands by the bishop, and did such duties as those of the usher and the sexton in modern churches. These four offices were classed as Minor Orders. The offices of priest and deacon were the Higher, or "Holy," Orders. How about the office of sub-deacon? That seems to have been regarded as on the mystic border line between the other two, ranking with the Holy Orders in dignity and below them in power. But it was classed with them. "For reader one should be appointed. of a plain utterance, and capable of clearly expounding, mindful that he rules in the place of an evangelist." (Harnack, "Sources of the Apostolic Canons," A. 3; pp. 1517, E. T.) "Ordain a reader by laying thy hands upon him, and pray unto God and say: O Eternal God, . . . do thou also now look upon thy servant, who is to be intrusted to read the Holy Scriptures to thy people, and give thy Holy Spirit, the prophetic spirit." (Apost. Const., VIII., iii., 22.) In organizing the Church of Scotland, John Knox provided for the appointment of readers, whose duty it was to read the Scriptures and the congregational prayers, but not to preach or to administer sacraments. (Brown, "Life of Knox," Bk. II., p. 131.) Cf. the office of lay reader in the Protestant Episcopal Church. V. SERVICE: THE DEACONESS. We have seen reason to believe that the diaconate is the most characteristic and, in name at least, the most catholic of the three chief offices in the Christian Church. But we shall find that it may claim still another distinction. It is the only one of the three which (except in a few not significant instances) has opened its doors for the admission of women. This of course is no matter of mere circumstance or accident. Is it not an official recognition of a certain immense amount of special fitness for Christian ministration that would otherwise fail to be utilized? Sympathetic personal service to the needy in body or mind-that was the primitive diaconal office. But the same is a distinctive gift and grace of womanhood. For this reason a church itself may be fittingly thought of as woman and mother "the elect lady and her children." One need not be surprised, therefore, if it should appear that the deaconess more nearly than the deacon represents, in the present day, the original idea of the Christian diaconate." I. RISE OF THE WOMAN'S DIACONATE. The office of deaconess seems to have had its rise in the East. As to when and under what circumstances, however, it is impossible to tell. Prior to the fourth century there is no reference to it as an existing institution anywhere in Christian literature. Neither Ignatius, nor Tertullian, nor Origen-none of the fathers of the second or the third century-makes any men 12 John I. "It is no usurpation of office, but the redemption of office, for them [ministering women] to organize a corporate existence of their own which will require the normal authority of the Church to follow if it fail to lead. Already its male deaconship is comparatively idle, being superseded by the voluntaryism of woman." (McGill, “Church Government," p. 393.) 1 tion of such an office. The probability is that it attained no prominence, even if it had been instituted, before the fourth century. True, a very early suggestion of some such office may be found in a letter from the pen of a pagan writer. This letter is one of the famous official communications of Pliny the Younger, proconsul of Bithynia, about A.D. 112, to the emperor Trajan. The cultured Governor writing to his intimate friend, the wise and energetic Emperor, concerning the inquiries he has been making into the beliefs and practices of the Christians, tells of having put to the torture, in the course of his investigations, two maidservants "who were called deaconesses (ministræ).' But whether the word ministra (the Latin equivalent of diaкóvioσa, woman servant), as here used, implies membership in a sisterhood of deaconesses, in the present sense of the word, is very doubtful. It has been conjectured also that a certain Christian woman, Grapte, mentioned by Hermas in "The Pastor," was an official deaconess-the merest guess. 992 Very different, however, is the evidence offered on this subject by the fourth and fifth centuries. Here we have not only the testimony of individual writers, such as Basil the Great, Chrysostom, and the historian Sozomen, to the existence of the order of deaconesses, but also the decrees of General Councils for its regulation.* Here indeed, in the fourth century, we shall find what might be called the golden age of the woman's diaconate. Chrysostom (347-407), for example, had as many as forty deaconesses employed in his church in Constantinople, and six others in a 'Passages in writers of this period that have sometimes been used to show the existence of the office of deaconess-for example, Ignatius to the Smyrneans, "Conclusion," and Tertullian, "On the Veiling of Virgins," c. ix. are better understood as having no reference to this office. Ep. X. 96. "You will write, therefore, two books, and you will send one to Clemens and the other to Grapte, and Grapte will admonish the widows and the orphans." (Hermas, Vis. ii. 4.) 'Council of Nice, Can. XIX.; Council of Chalcedon, Can. XV. |