The Masculine Cross. Anonymous

idolatrous images. Examples are not far to seek. Your victories you celebrate with religious ceremony as deities, and they are more august in proportion to the joy they bring you. The frames on which you hang up your crosses—these are as it were the very core of your pageants. Thus in your victories the religion of your camp makes even crosses objects of worship; your standards it adores, your standards are the sanction of its oaths, your standards it prefers before Jupiter himself. But all that parade of images and that display of pure gold, are as so many necklaces of the crosses. In like manner also in the banners and ensigns, which your soldiers guard with no less sacred care, you have the streamers and vestments of your crosses. You are ashamed, I suppose, to worship unadorned and simple crosses.”

      We give this passage at length because it emphasises what we are urging in connection with this subject, viz., that the cross is common to both Christianity and Paganism, that the latter possessed it ages before the former, and is therefore more likely to have originated it. We speak with some reserve on this latter point for want of proper and full evidence. It may of course be possible that in a purer and more enlightened age the cross was known and used; we shall probably, however, find our researches stop short in Pagan times, in which we shall have to look for the generally recognised meaning of the symbol.

      It is remarkable in the quotation just made, that Tertullian never attempts to refute the charge brought by the Pagans against the Christians of his time of worshipping the cross; he merely retaliates by asserting that they did the very same thing in a somewhat different manner. “As for him,” he says, “who affirms that we are the priesthood of a cross, we shall claim him as our co-religionist.... What, let me ask, is the difference between the Athenian Pallas or the Pharian Ceres, and wood formed into a cross?”

      He further identifies himself and his religion with the Pagans in this particular by saying:—“In all our movements, our travels, our going out and coming in, putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down: whatever employment occupies us, we mark our forehead with the sign of the cross.” How much all this reminds us of the universality of the symbol in pre-Christian times. We can scarcely point to an age or to a century in which it did not in some way enter into its history, its theology, its social and domestic life. Again and again have monuments been discovered which put the date of its use further back than had been imagined, and some have been brought to light which carry the story back into very remote antiquity indeed. In the wilds of Central India, for instance, a little over twenty years back, the late Mr. Mulheran, C.E., discovered two of the oldest crosses ever met with. They were granite monoliths, perfect in structure, and very much like those to be found here and there in the western parts of Cornwall. One was ten feet nine inches in height, and the other eight feet six inches; each being in the midst of a group of cairns and cromlechs or dolmens, which Colonel Taylor describes as similar in character to some which he formerly surveyed near the village of Rajunkolloor, within the Principality of Shorapoor, in the Deccan. Their extreme antiquity is inferred from the fact, as stated by the European officer who first discovered them, that the vicinity of the groups of cromlechs and crosses had, at some remote period, been cultivated; that parts of the hills had been cut into terraces, and supported by large stone banks or walls; but that the country for miles in every direction was, and had been for centuries and centuries, entirely uninhabited, and was grown over with dense forests. It has been estimated that, as this elevated and long-neglected region has been the possession of the low castes, or non-Aryan helots, from time immemorial, we may confidently assume that the monoliths in question were erected by the aboriginal population of the soil—a population which was driven, not improbably three thousand years, at the least, before the advent of Christ, from the richer plains below by the first Aryan invader who had crossed the five streams, and found a temporary refuge in the nearest range of hills to the west of Chandar, until another foe—the Mogul—appeared upon the scene, and finally subdued both the conqueror and his victims. “Here then,” says a reviewer, “amongst these now fragmentary people from the débris of a widely-spread primeval race (to borrow a phrase from a recent writer on the non-Aryan languages of the Continent), we find the symbol of the cross, not only expressing the same mystery as in all other parts of the world, but its erection, doubtless, dating from one of the very earliest migrations of our species.” It is impossible to adduce any clearer or stronger proof of its primitive antiquity than this.

      It has been suggested by some writers, who, for some reason or other, objected to the recognition of the cross as an emblem of great antiquity, that the stone structures which were erected in the British Islands by the Druids, Saxons, and Danes, owed their cruciform character to the necessities of the situation rather than to any other cause; that the stones were placed across each other as a matter of mere convenience, and not with the view of forming a cross, and that these monuments, which served as instruments of Druidical superstition before the implanting of the Gospel in Britain, were afterwards appropriated to the use of Christian memorials by being formed in the figure of a cross or marked with this emblem. It is admitted, of course, that those cruciform structures were thus appropriated, but of what use will it be to repudiate the antiquity of examples whose age has been far surpassed in other parts of the world. The crosses of India, just alluded to, remain to be accounted for, and even when they have been as summarily disposed of as the British ones, there are the crosses suspended from the necks of the Assyrian kings, whose existence cannot possibly be accounted for by the above hypothesis. It was not necessity or convenience that designed a Maltese cross, a thousand years before the Christian era, of precisely the same form as that which is worn by men and women in this nineteenth century, nor probably was it a merely ornamental taste; we are rather disposed to believe that the secret lies in the symbolical meaning, which has ever been attached to the form.

      The universality of the cross as a religious symbol is certainly a most astounding fact, and the more so because it has evidently always represented the same fundamental idea in connection with the theological systems, in all ages, of the Old and New Worlds. If but one of these mythologies possessed it, there might be little difficulty in tracing out the significance of the coincidence between its existence there and in Christian theology, but prevailing as it does universally, and destined as it is to retain its connection with the religion of man, it excites feelings of the most profound wonderment and surprise. Lipsius and other early writers, in reference to this matter, declared their sincere belief that the numerous cruciform figures to be found on the monuments of antiquity were of a typical character, and expressed a sentiment which looked forward to the cross of Christ; a few others doubted this, and suggested difficulties, while Gibbon ridiculed the whole matter, as it thus stood, from beginning to end. The belief, however, that the cross in Pagan lands was in some incomprehensible manner connected with the same object or idea as in the Christian church was not easily got rid of, and was considerably deepened by the testimony of missionaries to the New World that amongst people of apparently different origin and of altogether different attributes, the cross was common as an object of worship and veneration. So universal has the presence of this symbol and its attendant worship been found that it has been said to form a complete zone about the habitable globe, extending as it does from Assyria into Egypt, and India, and Anahuac, in their ruined temples; to the pyramidal structures of East and West, and to those in Polynesia, especially the islands of Tonga, Viti, and Easter; “as it appears upon numberless vases, medals, and coins of the earliest known types, centuries anterior to the introduction of Christianity; and as its teaching is expressed in the concordant customs, rites, and traditions of former nations and communities, who were widely separated from, and for the most part ignorant of, the existence of each other, and who possessed, so far as we are aware, no other emblematical figure in common.” Egypt, Assyria, Britain, India, China, Scandinavia, the two Americas—all were alike its home, and in all of them was there analogy in the teaching respecting its meaning.

CHAPTER II.

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