st between the meaning of their names and the Christian lives
they had lived. Two dainty women, probably belonging to a class in
which a delicate withdrawal from effort and toil was thought to be
the woman's distinctive mark, had fled from luxury, which often
tended to be voluptuous, and was always self-indulgent, and had
chosen the better part of 'labour in the Lord.' They had become
untrue to their names, because they must be true to their Master and
themselves. We may well take the lesson that lies here, and is
eminently needful to-day amidst the senseless, and often sinful, tide
of luxury which runs so strongly as to threaten the great and eternal
Christian principle of self-denial.

The first thing that strikes us in looking at these salutations is
the illustration which it gives of the uniting power of a common
faith. Tryphena and Tryphosa were probably Roman ladies of some
social standing, and their names may indicate that they at least
inherited a tendency to exclusiveness; yet here they occur
immediately after the household of Narcissus and in close connection
with that of Aristobulus, both of which are groups of slaves.
Aristobulus was a grandson of Herod the Great, and Narcissus was a
well-known freedman, whose slaves at his death would probably become
the property of the Emperor. Other common slave names are those of
Ampliatus and Urbanus; and here in these lists they stand side by
side with persons of some distinction in the Roman world, and with
men and women of widely differing nationalities. The Church of Rome
would have seemed to any non-Christian observer a motley crowd in
which racial distinctions, sex, and social conditions had all been
swept away by the rising tide of a common fanaticism. In it was
exemplified in actual operation Paul's great principle that in Christ
Jesus 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor
free, but in Him all are one.' Roman society in that day, as Juvenal
shows us, was familiar with the levelling and uniting power of common
vice and immorality, and the few sternly patriotic Romans who were
left lamented that 'the Orontes flowed into the Tiber'; but such
common wallowing in filth led to no real unity, whereas, in the
obscure corner of the great city where there were members of the
infant Church gathered together, there was the beginning of a common
life in the one Lord which lifted each participant of it out of the
dreary solitude of individuality, and imp