bond of a common faith. The world was then broken up into
sections, which were sometimes bitterly antagonistic and at others
merely rigidly exclusive. The only bond of union was the iron fetter
of Rome, which crushed the people, but did not knit them together.
But here are Paul the Jew, Phoebe the Greek, and the Roman readers of
the epistle, all fused together by the power of the divine love that
melted their hearts, and the common faith that unified their lives.
The list of names in this chapter, comprising as it does men and
women of many nationalities, and some slaves as well as freemen, is
itself a wonderful testimony of the truth of Paul's triumphant
exclamation in another epistle, that in Christ there is 'neither Jew
nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female.'

The clefts have closed, and the very line of demarcation is
obliterated; and these clefts were deeper than any of which we
moderns have had experience. It remains something like a miracle that
the members of Paul's churches could ever be brought together, and
that their consciousness of oneness could ever overpower the
tremendous divisive forces. We sometimes wonder at their bickerings;
we ought rather to wonder at their unity, and be ashamed of the
importance which we attach to our infinitely slighter mutual
disagreements. The bond that was sufficient to make the early
Christians all one in Christ Jesus seems to have lost its binding
power to-day, and, like an used-up elastic band, to have no clasping
grip left in it.

Another thought which we may connect with the name of Phoebe is the
characteristic place of women in Christianity.

The place of woman amongst the Jews was indeed free and honourable as
compared with her position either in Greece or Rome, but in none of
them was she placed on the level of man, nor regarded mainly in the
aspect of an equal possessor of the same life of the Spirit. But a
religion which admits her to precisely the same position of a
supernatural life as is granted to man, necessarily relegates to a
subordinate position all differences of sex as it does all other
natural distinctions. The women who ministered to Jesus of their
substance, the two sisters of Bethany, the mourners at Calvary, the
three who went through the morning twilight to the tomb, were but the
foremost conspicuous figures in a great company through all the ages
who have owed to Jesus their redemption, not only from the slavery of
sin, but from the stigma