still kept in memory by the Greek Church, a solemn festival being held
upon anniversaries of the day in question. But which particular
"salutary sign" thus shone in the sky like the Sun for hours, is
uncertain.

These painfully obvious inventions cannot but incline broad-minded
Christians to the belief that our Church went to great lengths in order
to induce people to believe that the cross was essentially a
_Christian_ symbol; which tends to show that there was a danger of
their thinking otherwise.

It is also clear from the evidence already quoted concerning the
adoption by Christians in the fourth century of a symbol they denounced
in the third, that whether Jesus was executed upon a cross-shaped
instrument or not, that was not the chief reason why the phallic symbol
of Life became recognised as the symbol of the Christ.

The striking fact that though, as will be shown, the cross of four
equal arms (a cross which, as we have seen, preceded the Latin cross as
a Christian symbol, and one form of which is still the favourite symbol
of the Greek Church; while even in the other two great divisions of
Christendom its numerous variations, wheel-like and otherwise, as a
whole dispute the supremacy with the Latin cross) occurs many times
upon the coins of Constantine, yet it was the so-called Monogram of
Christ or adapted solar wheel of the Gauls which the Christians of the
fourth century were most careful to claim as a Christian symbol, should
also be noted. For though the cross of four equal arms was also put by
Constantine upon his coins as a solar symbol, yet that, being then, as
for ages previously, a symbol of the Sun-God of world-wide acceptation,
and one which as we shall see had already appeared as such upon Roman