Fabiola, Paula, Melania, and a host of other noble ladies devoted their time and fortunes mainly to founding and extending vast institutions of charity, some of them of a kind before unknown in the world. The Empress Flacilla was accustomed to tend with her own hands the sick in the hospitals,(777) and a readiness to discharge such offices was deemed the first duty of a Christian wife.(778) From age to age the impulse thus communicated has been felt. There has been no period, however corrupt, there has been no Church, however superstitious, that has not been adorned by many Christian women devoting their entire lives to assuaging the sufferings of men; and the mission of charity thus instituted has not been more efficacious in diminishing the sum of human wretchedness, than in promoting the moral dignity of those by whom it was conducted. Among the Collyridian heretics, women were admitted to the priesthood. Among the orthodox, although this honour was not bestowed upon them, they received a religious consecration, and discharged some minor ecclesiastical functions under the name of deaconesses.(779) This order may be traced to the Apostolic period.(780) It consisted of elderly virgins, who were set apart by a formal ordination, and were employed in assisting as catechists and attendants at the baptism of women, in visiting the sick, ministering to martyrs in prison, preserving order in the congregations, and accompanying and presenting women who desired an interview with the bishop. It would appear, from the evidence of some councils, that abuses gradually crept into this institution, and the deaconesses at last faded into simple nuns, but they were still in existence in the East in the twelfth century. Besides these, widows, when they had been but once married, were treated with peculiar honour, and were made the special recipients of the charity of the Church. Women advanced in years, who, either from their single life or from bereavement, have been left without any male protector in the world, have always been peculiarly deserving of commiseration. With less strength, and commonly with less means, and less knowledge of the world than men, they are liable to contract certain peculiarities of mind and manner to which an excessive amount of ridicule has been attached, and age in most cases furnishes them with very little to compensate for the charms of which it has deprived them. The weight and dignity of matured wisdom, which make the old age of one sex so venerable, are more rarely found in that of the other, and even physical beauty is more frequently the characteristic of an old man than of an old woman. The Church laboured steadily to cast a halo of reverence around this period of woman’s life, and its religious exercises have done very much to console and to occupy it.