It seems to me that the passages on which these opinions have been based do not substantiate a fixed and definite office, but mere casual and sporadic services. It is towards the middle of the third century that in all probability the new order became common in all the Churches of the East, for then the circumstances were such as to demand its existence. First of all widowhood had fallen in the spiritual market and virginity had risen. It was not wrong for the widow to have married, but the act implied a certain weakness and she thereby contracted a stain which rendered her less fit for the service of the Church. Accordingly, even in the time of Tertullian[120], virgins were elected for the duties and called widows. “I know plainly,” he says, “that in a certain place a virgin of less than twenty years of age has been placed in the order of widows.” He himself objects in the strongest manner to this innovation, and speaks of this virgin as a monster--a virgin-widow, and unfit for the work, because she had not had experience in the married life and in the training of children. But the respect for virginity was at that time growing, and other circumstances combined to evoke the new order. To the end of the second century there were no public buildings for Christian worship. The Christians met in private houses, and the tenants of the houses made all the arrangements necessary for the meetings. But when churches began to be built, officials had to look after them, and this duty was assigned to the deacons. In the advance of ascetic ideas, the women sat or stood apart from the men, and entered by a separate door. And at this door stood the deaconess to direct the worshippers to their places, and to see that all behaved quietly and reverently. This was the great work of women in the Church, and in the end became nearly their only work. But they had also to help the deacons in any service which was deemed more suitable for women. Thus, in baptism, the women were immersed, but it was not seemly that all the preparations for the ceremonial should be made by the men, and the dressing and undressing were committed to the care of the deaconess. At the same rite the deacon anointed only the forehead of the Christian woman with oil; the deaconess then anointed her whole body. The deaconess also undertook the work which the widows had done in carrying messages and ministering to the temporal wants of poor women. “Thou shalt send a woman a deaconess, on account of the imaginations of the bad,” is the order given in the Apostolical Constitutions.[121]