not only ‘live in Him,’ but all our work begun, continued, and ended in Him, will in Him and by Him be accepted.  There is no victorious antagonist of worldly ease and self-indulgence comparable to the living consciousness of union with Jesus and His life in us.  To dwell in the swamps at the bottom of the mountain is to live in a region where effort is impossible and malaria weakens vitality; to climb the heights brings bracing to the limbs and a purer air into the expanding lungs, and makes work delightsome that would have been labour down below.  If we are ‘in the Lord,’ He is our atmosphere, and we can draw from Him full draughts of a noble life in which we shall not need the stimulus of self-interest or worldly success to use it to the utmost in acts of service to Him.  They who live in the Lord will labour in the Lord, and they who labour in the Lord will rest in the Lord.

PERSIS

   ’Salute the beloved Persis, who laboured much in
   the Lord.’—­ROMANS xvi. 12.

There are a great number of otherwise unknown Christians who pass for a moment before our view in this chapter.  Their characterisations are like the slight outlines in the background of some great artist’s canvas:  a touch of the brush is all that is spared for each, and yet, if we like to look sympathetically, they live before us.  Now, this good woman, about whom we never hear again, and for whom these few words are all her epitaph—­was apparently, judging by her name, of Persian descent, and possibly had been brought to Rome as a slave.  At all events, finding herself there, she had somehow or other become connected with the Church in that city, and had there distinguished herself by continuous and faithful Christian toil which had won the affection of the Apostle, though he had never seen her, and knew no more about her.  That is all.  She comes into the foreground for a moment, and then she vanishes.  What does she say to us?

First of all, like the others named by Paul, she helps us to understand, by her living example, that wonderful, new, uniting process that was carried on by means of Christianity.  The simple fact of a Persian woman getting a loving message from a Jew, the woman being in Rome and the Jew in Corinth, and the message being written in Greek, brings before us a whole group of nationalities all fused together.  They had been hammered together, or, if you like it better, chained together, by Roman power, but they were melted together by Christ’s Gospel.  This Eastern woman and this Jewish man, and the many others whose names and different nationalities pass in a flash before us in this chapter, were all brought together in Jesus Christ.

If we run our eye over these salutations, what strikes one, even at the first sight, is the very small number of Jewish names; only one certain, and another doubtful.  Four or five names are Latin, and then all the rest are Greek, but this woman seemingly came from further east than any of them.  There they all were, forgetting the hostile nationalities to which they belonged, because they had found One who had brought them into one great community.  We talk about the uniting influence of Christianity, but when we see the process going on before us, in a case like this, we begin to understand it better.