And his helmet was to be the hope of Salvation—that is, of safety: not merely of being saved in the next world—though of course St. Paul includes that—but of being saved in this world; of coming safe through the battle of life; of succeeding; of conquering the heathen round them, and making them Christians, instead of being conquered by them. The hope of safety was to be his helmet, to guard his head—the thinking part. We all know how a blow on the head confuses and paralyses a man, making him (as we say) lose his head. We know too, how, in spiritual matters, terror and despair deal a deadly blow to a man’s mind,—how if a man expects to fail, he cannot think clearly and calmly,—how often desperation and folly go hand in hand; for, if a man loses hope, he is but too apt to lose his reason. The Christian’s helmet, then,—that which would save his head, and keep his mind calm, prudent, strong, and active,—was the hope of success. And for their feet—they must be shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace. That is a grand saying, if you will remember that the key-word, which explains it all, is Peace, and the Gospel, that is, the good news, 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.