lace, in each case there was but a section of
the household which was Christian. In the third place, in neither
household is the master included in the greeting. So in neither case
was _he_ a Christian.

We do not know anything about these two persons, men of position
evidently, who had large households. But the most learned of our
living English commentators of the New Testament has advanced a very
reasonable conjecture in regard to each of them. As to the first of
them, Aristobulus: that wicked old King Herod, in whose life Christ
was born, had a grandson of the name, who spent all his life in Rome,
and was in close relations with the Emperor of that day. He had died
some little time before the writing of this letter. As to the second
of them, there is a very notorious Narcissus, who plays a great part
in the history of Rome just a little while before Paul's period
there, and he, too, was dead. And it is more than probable that the
slaves and retainers of these two men were transferred in both cases
to the emperor's household and held together in it, being known as
Aristobulus' men and Narcissus' men. And so probably the Christians
among them are the brethren to whom these salutations are sent.

Be that as it may, I think that if we look at the two groups, we
shall get out of them some lessons.

I. The first of them is this: the penetrating power of Christian
truth. Think of the sort of man that the master of the first
household was, if the identification suggested be accepted. He is one
of that foul Herodian brood, in all of whom the bad Idumaean blood ran
corruptly. The grandson of the old Herod, the brother of Agrippa of
the Acts of the Apostles, the hanger-on of the Imperial Court, with
Roman vices veneered on his native wickedness, was not the man to
welcome the entrance of a revolutionary ferment into his household;
and yet through his barred doors had crept quietly, he knowing
nothing about it, that great message of a loving God, and a Master
whose service was freedom. And in thousands of like cases the Gospel
was finding its way underground, undreamed of by the great and wise,
but steadily pressing onwards, and undermining all the towering
grandeur that was so contemptuous of it. So Christ's truth spread at
first; and I believe that is the way it always spreads. Intellectual
revolutions begin at the top and filter down; religious revolutions
begin at the bottom and rise; and it is always the 'lower orders'