There were no difficulties too great for these men to overcome; there are no difficulties too great for us to overcome.  And wherever you and I may be, we cannot be in any place where it is so hard to live a consistent life as these people were.  Young men in warehouses, people in business here in Manchester, some of us with unfortunate domestic or relative associations, and so on—­we may all feel as if it would be so much easier for us if this, that, and the other thing were changed.  No, it would not be any easier; and perhaps the harder the easier, because the more obviously the atmosphere is poisonous, the more we shall put some cloth over our mouths to prevent it from getting into our lungs.  The dangerous place is the place where the vapours that poison are scentless as well as invisible.  But whatever be the difficulties, there is strength waiting for us, and we may all win the praise which the Apostle gives to another of these Roman brethren, whom he salutes as ’Apelles, approved in Christ’—­a man that had been ‘tried’ and had stood his trial.  So in our various spheres of difficulty and of temptation we may feel that the greeting from heaven, like Paul’s message to the slaves in Rome, comes to us with good cheer, and that the Master Himself sees us, sympathises with us, salutes us, and stretches out His hand to help and to keep us.

TRYPHENA AND TRYPHOSA

   ’Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour
   in the Lord.’—­ROMANS xvi. 12.

The number of salutations to members of the Roman Church is remarkable when we take into account that Paul had never visited it.  The capital drew all sorts of people to it, and probably there had been personal intercourse between most of the persons here mentioned and the Apostle in some part of his wandering life.  He not only displays his intimate knowledge of the persons saluted, but his beautiful delicacy and ingenuity in the varying epithets applied to them shows how in his great heart and tenacious memory individuals had a place.  These shadowy saints live for ever by Paul’s brief characterisation of them, and stand out to us almost as clearly and as sharply distinguished as they did to him.

These two, Tryphena and Tryphosa, were probably sisters.  That is rendered likely by their being coupled together here, as well as by the similarity of their names.  These names mean luxurious, or delicate, and no doubt expressed the ideal for their daughters which the parents had had, and possibly indicate the kind of life from which these two women had come.  We can scarcely fail to note the contrast between the meaning of their names and the Christian lives they had lived.  Two dainty women, probably belonging to a class in which a delicate withdrawal from effort and toil was thought to be the woman’s distinctive mark, had fled from luxury, which often tended to be voluptuous, and was always self-indulgent, and had chosen the better part of ‘labour in the Lord.’  They had become untrue to their names, because they must be true to their Master and themselves.  We may well take the lesson that lies here, and is eminently needful to-day amidst the senseless, and often sinful, tide of luxury which runs so strongly as to threaten the great and eternal Christian principle of self-denial.