instrument of execution upon which Jesus died, what more likely than
that the early Christians venerated the sign and figure of the cross as
the age-old and widely accepted symbol of Life and of the Sun-God we
know it to have been?

Anyway Minucius Felix may be said to stand alone in denouncing the
symbol of the cross as non-Christian. And as even he expresses
veneration for the figure of the cross, and must have approved of the
sign of the cross in the initiatory rite of baptism, that denunciation
evidently applied only to material representations of the cross.

Moreover the denunciation in question was clearly due to the fear that
such objects might degenerate amongst Christians, as they afterwards
did, into little better than idols. And if the sign or figure of the
cross did not mainly remind the early Christians of the death of Jesus,
it must have mainly reminded them of something else.



CHAPTER III.

THE EVIDENCE OF THE OTHER FATHERS.

The works which have come down to us from the Fathers who lived before
the days of Constantine make up over ten thousand pages of closely
printed matter; and the first point which strikes those who examine
that mass of literature with a view to seeing what the Christians of
the first three centuries thought and wrote concerning the execution of
Jesus and the symbol of the cross, is that the execution of Jesus was
hardly so much as mentioned by them, and no such thing as a