But another point may be noticed in regard to this uniting process—­how it brought into action the purest and truest love as a bond that linked men.  There are four or five of the people commended in this chapter of whom the Apostle has nothing to say but that they are beloved.  This is the only woman to whom he applies that term.  And notice his instinctive delicacy:  when he is speaking of men he says, ‘My beloved’; when he is greeting Persis he says, ‘the beloved,’ that there may be no misunderstanding about the ’my’—­’the beloved Persis which laboured much in the Lord’—­indicating, by one delicate touch, the loftiness, the purity, and truly Christian character of the bond that held them together.  And that is no true Church, where anything but that is the bond—­the love that knits us to one another, because we believe that each is knit to the dear Lord and fountain of all love.

What more does this good woman say to us?  She is an example living and breathing there before us, of what a woman may be in God’s Church.  Paul had never been in Rome; no Apostle, so far as we know, had had anything to do with the founding of the Church.  The most important Church in the Roman Empire, and the Church which afterwards became the curse of Christendom, was founded by some anonymous Christians, with no commission, with no supervision, with no officials amongst them, but who just had the grace of God in their hearts, and found themselves in Rome, and could not help speaking about Jesus Christ.  God helped them, and a little Church sprang into being.  And the great abundance of salutations here, and the honourable titles which the Apostle gives to the Christians of whom he speaks, and many of whom he signalises as having done great service, are a kind of certificate on his part to the vigorous life which, without any apostolic supervision or official direction, had developed itself there in that Church.

Now, it is to be noticed that this striking form of eulogium which is attached to our Persis she shares in common with others in the group.  And it is to be further noticed that all those who are, as it were, decorated with this medal—­on whom Paul bestows this honour of saying that they had ‘laboured,’ or ‘laboured much in the Lord,’ are women that stand alone in the list.  There are several other women in it, but they are all coupled with men—­husbands or brothers, or some kind of relative.  But there are three sets of women, I do not say single women, but three sets of women, standing singly in the list, and it is about them, and them only, that Paul says they ‘laboured,’ or ‘laboured much.’  There is a Mary who stands alone, and she ’bestowed much labour on’ Paul and others.  Then there are, in the same verse as my text, two sisters, Tryphena and Tryphosa, whose names mean ’the luxurious.’  And the Apostle seems to think, as he writes the two names that spoke of self-indulgence:  ’Perhaps these rightly described these two women once, but