waiting for him, but the most important thing was that there was a church of Christ in Rome and Paul could see the members and make the church grow larger! XXI THE TRIUMPH OF THE HERO “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,” Paul had said in his letter to Rome. “It is the _power_ of God.” Rome was the most powerful city the world had ever seen up to that time. Its armies had gone everywhere and this city on the Tiber had become the conqueror of all lands and peoples. Out from the capital of the empire the roads ran like the spokes of a wheel from the hub, and the soldiers marched forth from this centre to subdue countries and to hold them wherever the emperor wished to send them. Here was power which all eyes could see and which all men could feel. Over against this visible power, Paul knew that he had discovered a new kind of power. It could not be seen as armies could be seen, but it changed lives and it remade cities and it upheld and supported men and women in the hardest suffering and trial. Here was this man now bound with chains, guarded by soldiers, a prisoner of the emperor’s, weak, frail, alone, but in reality the bravest, strongest, most powerful man in the whole empire. Nero is dead now. His empire has passed away. But Paul is still a mighty power in the world. Eight million copies of his letters are sold every year. Everybody reads what he wrote and he still goes on working in the world as though he were yet alive and speaking. At first, when he came to Rome, he was treated kindly and was allowed to have his own house, though of course he was under the care of Roman soldiers. The guard was changed every day so that he constantly had new soldiers by him. It gave him a splendid chance to preach his gospel to the Roman army, for he would surely never let a soldier stay all day by him without telling him of Christ. It must have _worked_, too, for, in his letter to the church at Philippi, he writes that “the saints in Cæsar’s household send greetings,” and he also says that he has been able to spread the news of Christ through the whole prætorian guard. Perhaps he did more as a prisoner than he could have done as a travelling preacher. Paul was the kind of man that would appeal to soldiers. They could see at once that he was as brave as they were, and they could feel that he was in his way a hero, and they were ready to listen to his story and we may be sure that many of them went back to Cæsar’s palace changed into “saints.” Others went out with the army and carried the truth about Christ into the lands where they were stationed. “It has all happened right,” Paul wrote to his friends. “My chains have helped to spread the gospel!”