they do not now.  In the bad old days, before they were Christians, they may have been rightly named luxurious-living.  But here is their name now, the luxurious is turned into the self-sacrificing worker, and the two sisters “labour in the Lord."’ Then comes our friend Persis, who also stands alone, and she shares in the honour that only these other two companies of women share with her.  She ‘laboured much in the Lord.’  In that little community, without any direction from Apostles and authorised teachers, the brethren and sisters had every one found their tasks; and these solitary women, with nobody to say to them, ’Go and do this or that,’ had found out for themselves, or rather had been taught by the Spirit of Jesus, what they had to do, and they worked at it with a will.  There are many things that Christian women can do a great deal better than men, and we are not to forget that this modern talk about the emancipation of women has its roots here in the New Testament.  We are not to forget either that prerogative means obligation, and that the elevation of woman means the laying upon her of solemn duties to perform.  I wonder how many of the women members of our Churches and congregations deserve such a designation as that?  We hear a great deal about ‘women’s rights’ nowadays.  I wish some of my friends would lay a little more to heart than they do, ’women’s duties.’

And now, lastly, the final lesson that I draw from this eulogium of an otherwise altogether unknown woman is that she is a model of Christian service.

First, in regard to its measure.  She ‘laboured much in the Lord.’  Now, both these two words, ‘laboured’ and ‘much,’ are extremely emphatic.  The word rightly translated ‘laboured’ will appear in its full force if I recall to you a couple of other places in which it is employed in the New Testament.  You remember that touching incident about our Lord when, being ’wearied with His journey, He sat thus on the well.’  ‘Wearied’ is the same word as is here used.  Then, you remember how the Apostle, after he had been hauling empty nets all night in the little, wet, dirty fishing-boat, said, perhaps with a yawn, ’Master, we have toiled all the night and caught nothing.’  He uses the same word as is employed here.  Such is the sort of work that these women had done—­work carried to the point of exhaustion, work up to the very edge of their powers, work unsparing and continuous, and not done once in some flash of evanescent enthusiasm, but all through a dreary night, in spite of apparent failures.

There is the measure of service.  Many of us seem to think that if we say ‘I am tired,’ that is a reason for not doing anything.  Sometimes it is, no doubt; and no man has a right so to labour as to impair his capacity for future labour, but subject to that condition I do not know that the plea of fatigue is a sufficient reason for idleness.  And I am quite sure that the true example for us is the example