of
the peace and joy of the Gospel. The more you have of Jesus Christ in
your lives and hearts to-day, the surer you will be that whatever
death may do, it cannot touch that, and the more ludicrously
impossible it will seem that anything that befalls this poor body can
touch the bond that knits us to Jesus Christ. Death can separate us
from a great deal. Its sharp scythe cuts through all other bonds, but
its edge is turned when it is tried against the golden chain that
binds the believing soul to the Christ in whom he has believed.

So, brethren, there is the ladder--begin at the bottom step, with
faith in Jesus Christ. That will bring God's direct action into your
spirit, through His Holy Spirit, and that one gift will break up into
an endless multiplicity of blessings, just as a beam of light spilt
upon the surface of the ocean breaks into diamonds in every wave, and
that 'joy and peace' will kindle in your hearts a hope fed by the
great words of the Lord: 'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give
unto you,' 'My joy shall remain in you, and your joy shall be full,'
'He that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.'

PHOEBE

'I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant
of the Church that is at Cenchrea: 2. That ye receive her
in the Lord, worthily of the Saints, and that ye assist
her in whatsover matter she may have need of you: for she
herself hath been a succourer of many, and of mine own
self.'--ROMANS xvi. 1, 2 (R.V.).

This is an outline picture of an else wholly unknown person. She,
like most of the other names mentioned in the salutations in this
chapter, has had a singular fate. Every name, shadowy and unreal as
it is to us, belonged to a human life filled with hopes and fears,
plunged sometimes in the depths of sorrows, struggling with anxieties
and difficulties; and all the agitations have sunk into forgetfulness
and calm. There is left to the world an immortal remembrance, and
scarcely a single fact associated with the undying names.

Note the person here disclosed.

A little rent is made in the dark curtain through which we see as
with an incandescent light concentrated for a moment upon her, one of
the many good women who helped Paul, as their sisters had helped
Paul's Master, and who thereby have won, little as either Paul or she
thought it, an eternal commemoration. Her name is a purely idolatrous
one, and stamps her as a Greek, and by birth probably a wor