that are laid hold of first. 'Ye see your calling, brethren, how that
not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble
are called,' but a handful of slaves in Aristobulus' household, with
this living truth lodged in their hearts, were the bearers and the
witnesses and the organs of the power which was going to shatter all
that towered above it and despised it. And so it always is.

Do not let us be ashamed of a Gospel that has not laid hold of the
upper and the educated classes, but let us feel sure of this, that
there is no greater sign of defective education and of superficial
culture and of inborn vulgarity than despising the day of small
things, and estimating truth by the position or the intellectual
attainments of the men that are its witnesses and its lovers. The
Gospel penetrated at first, and penetrates still, in the fashion that
is suggested here.

II. Secondly, these two households teach us very touchingly and
beautifully the uniting power of Christian sympathy.

A considerable proportion of the first of these two households would
probably be Jews--if Aristobulus were indeed Herod's grandson. The
probability that he was is increased by the greeting interposed
between those to the two households--'Salute Herodion.' The name
suggests some connection with Herod, and whether we suppose the
designation of 'my kinsman,' which Paul gives him, to mean 'blood
relation' or 'fellow countryman,' Herodion, at all events, was a Jew
by birth. As to the other members of these households, Paul may have
met some of them in his many travels, but he had never been in Rome,
and his greetings are more probably sent to them as conspicuous
sections, numerically, of the Roman Church, and as tokens of his
affection, though he had never seen them. The possession of a common
faith has bridged the gulf between him and them. Slaves in those days
were outside the pale of human sympathy, and almost outside the pale
of human rights. And here the foremost of Christian teachers, who was
a freeman born, separated from these poor people by a tremendous
chasm, stretches a brother's hand across it and grasps theirs. The
Gospel that came into the world to rend old associations and to split
up society, and to make a deep cleft between fathers and children and
husband and wife, came also to more than counterbalance its dividing
effects by its uniting power. And in that old world that was
separated into classes by gulfs deeper th