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Concerning a deaconess, I Bartholomew make this constitution: O Bishop, thou shalt lay thy hands upon her in the presence of the presbytery and of the deacons and deaconesses, and shalt say; O Eternal God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Creator of man and of woman; Who didst replenish with the Spirit Miriam, Deborah, Anna, and Huldah; Who didst not disdain that Thy Only begotten Son should be born of a woman; Who also in the tabernacle of the testimony and in the temple didst ordain women to be _keepers of Thy holy gates_;--look down now also upon this Thy servant, who is to be ordained to the office of a deaconess. Grant her Thy Holy Spirit and _cleanse her from all defilement of flesh and spirit_,[60] that she may worthily discharge the work which is committed to her, to Thy glory and the praise of Thy Christ, with Whom be glory and adoration to Thee and to the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.
gpt
The widows ought to be grave, obedient to their bishops, their presbyters, and their deacons; and besides these to the deaconesses, with piety, reverence, and fear.
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Let the deaconess be a pure virgin; or at least a widow who has been but once married. [62] But, although such things did occur, Tertullian protests that it is a monstrous irregularity to admit an unmarried woman to the order of widows.[63] Now, if widows and deaconesses were identical, unmarried
gpt
would have been quite common, for unmarried deaconesses were quite common. Yet he speaks of the one case of a
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which had come under his notice as a marvel, and a monstrosity, and a contradiction in terms. It is true that Ignatius in his letter to the Church of Smyrna uses language which has been thought to support the identification:
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I salute the households of my brethren with their wives and children, and _the virgins who are called widows_. [64] But it is incredible that at Smyrna _all_ the Church widows were unmarried; and it is equally improbable that Ignatius should send a salutation to the unmarried
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(if such there were), and ignore the rest. His language, however, may be quite easily explained without any such strange hypothesis. He may mean
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I salute those who are called widows, but whom one might really regard as virgins. And in support of this interpretation Bishop Lightfoot quotes Clement of Alexandria, who says that the continent man, like the continent widow, becomes again a virgin; and Tertullian, who speaks of continent widows as being in God's sight maidens (_Deo sunt puellæ_), and as for a second time virgins.[65] But, whatever Ignatius may have meant by