The elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity. The elder women as mothers - Treating them with the respect due to their age.
The younger as sisters - Feel for every member of the Church, old and young, male and female; consider them as fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters; treat them all with gentleness; and labor to keep them in, not to expel them from, the Church.
With all purity - Εν πασῃ ἁγνειᾳ· With all chastity. See the note on 1 Timothy 4:12.
There are some who seem to take a barbarous pleasure in expelling members from, the Church. They should be continued in as long as possible; while they are in the Church - under its ordinances and discipline, there is some hope that their errors may be corrected; but when once driven out again into the world, that hope must necessarily become extinct. As judgment is God's strange work, so excommunication should be the strange, the last, and the most reluctantly performed work of every Christian minister.