thereof.

The Roman soldier had his preparation, which kept him prepared and
ready to march through the world; and of that St. Paul was thinking,
and had need to think; for he had heard the sound of it in every
street, on every high road, from Jerusalem to Ephesus, ever since he
was a child--the tramp of the heavy nailed boot which the Roman
soldier always wore. The Roman soldiers were proud of their boots,--
so proud that, in St. Paul's time, they nicknamed one of their royal
princes Caligula, because, as a boy in camp, he used to wear boots
like the common soldiers: and he bore that name when he became
emperor, and bears it to this day. And they had reason to be proud,
after their own notion of glory. For that boot had carried them
through desert and through cities, over mountain ranges, through
trackless forests, from Africa even into Britain here, to be the
conquerors of the then known world; and, wherever the tramp of that
boot had been heard, it had been the sound, not of the good news of
peace, but of the evil news of war. Isaiah of old, watching for the
deliverance of the Jews from captivity, heard in the spirit the
footsteps of the messengers coming with the news that Cyrus was about
to send the Jews home to their own land, and cried, 'How beautiful
upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring good tidings, that
publish peace!' But the tramp of the Roman armies had as yet brought
little but bad tidings, and published destruction. Men slain in
battle, women and children driven off captive, villages burnt, towns
sacked and ruined, till wherever their armies passed--as one of their
own writers has said--they made a desert, and then called that peace.

So had the Roman soldier marched over the world, and conquered it.
And now Christ's soldiers were beginning their march over the world,