About a year after the first Epistle to the Corinthians was sent from Ephesus, the Epistle to the Romans was written, and we find there the salutation to Priscilla and Aquila which is my text.  So this wandering couple were back again in Rome by that time, and settled down there for a while.  They are then lost sight of for some time, but probably they returned to Ephesus.  Once more we catch a glimpse of them in Paul’s last letter, written some seven or eight years after that to the Romans.  The Apostle knows that death is near, and, at that supreme moment, his heart goes out to these two faithful companions, and he sends them a parting token of his undying love.  There are only two messages to friends in the second Epistle to Timothy, and one of these is to Prisca and Aquila.  At the mouth of the valley of the shadow of death he remembered the old days in Corinth, and the, to us, unknown instance of devotion which these two had shown, when, for his life, they laid down their own necks.

Such is all that we know of Priscilla and Aquila.  Can we gather any lessons from these scattered notices thus thrown together?

I. Here is an object lesson as to the hallowing effect of Christianity on domestic life and love.

Did you ever notice that in the majority of the places where these two are named, if we adopt the better readings, Priscilla’s name comes first?  She seems to have been ‘the better man of the two’; and Aquila drops comparatively into the background.  Now, such a couple, and a couple in which the wife took the foremost place, was an absolute impossibility in heathenism.  They are a specimen of what Christianity did in the primitive age, all over the Empire, and is doing to-day, everywhere—­lifting woman to her proper place.  These two, yoked together in ‘all exercise of noble end,’ and helping one another in Christian work, and bracketed together by the Apostle, who puts the wife first, as his fellow-helpers in Christ Jesus, stands before us as a living picture of what our sweet and sacred family life and earthly loves may be glorified into, if the light from heaven shines down upon them, and is thankfully received into them.

Such a house as the house of Prisca and Aquila is the product of Christianity, and such ought to be the house of every professing Christian.  For we should all make our homes as ’tabernacles of the righteous,’ in which the voice of joy and rejoicing is ever heard.  Not only wedded love, but family love, and all earthly love, are then most precious, when into them there flows the ennobling, the calming, the transfiguring thought of Christ and His love to us.