But if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them learn first to show piety towards their own family, and to repay their parents, for this is{TR adds "good and"} acceptable in the sight of God.

 As we have already said, if not as early as the time of the Pastoral Epistles, certainly in later days, the widows became an accepted order in the Christian Church. Their place and work are dealt with in the first eight chapters of the third book of The Apostolic Constitutions, and these chapters reveal the use that such an order could be and the dangers into which it almost inevitably ran. 