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 than any of which we have any experience, it, and it alone, threw a bridge across the abysses and bound men together.  Think of what a revolution it must have been, when a master and his slave could sit down together at the table of the Lord and look each other in the face and say ‘Brother’ and for the moment forget the difference of bond and free.  Think of what a revolution it must have been when Jew and Gentile could sit down together at the table of the Lord, and forget circumcision and uncircumcision, and feel that they were all one in Jesus Christ.  And as for the third of the great clefts—­that, alas! which made so much of the tragedy and the wickedness of ancient life—­viz. the separation between the sexes—­think of what a revolution it was when men and women, in all purity of the new bond of Christian affection, could sit down together at the same table, and feel that they were brethren and sisters in Jesus Christ.

The uniting power of the common faith and the common love to the one Lord marked Christianity as altogether supernatural and new, unique in the world’s experience, and obviously requiring something more than a human force to produce it.  Will anybody say that the Christianity of this day has preserved and exhibits that primitive demonstration of its superhuman source?  Is there anything obviously beyond the power of earthly motives in the unselfish, expansive