Having made clear the part played by Constantine in the prominence given in his lifetime to the cross as a symbol of the Roman Empire and therefore of what he made its State Religion, and having also shown that while the Christian chroniclers of those days are silent concerning the various forms of crosses placed by Constantine upon his coins they went out of their way to allude to the so-called Monogram of Christ as a cross, to claim it as such, and even to associate it with the sun, let us now turn our attention again to the pre-Christian cross.

So great was the veneration in which that phallic and solar symbol the cross was held in the ages which preceded the birth and death of Jesus, that the philosophers of those days even went so far as to declare that the cross was the figure of the Life or Soul of the Universe.

Though it is a matter of very considerable importance, we Christians for some reason or other ignore the fact that long before our era commenced philosophers thus conceived the figure of the cross to be the symbol of the Logos of God.

Now although, following the Gospel of St. John, we have made it a main article of our belief that the Logos, really the Thought plus Speech, of God, became about the year B.C. 4 specially incarnate in the person of Jesus the Nazarene, we ought not to forget that, being the one Power by which all that ever came into existence was created and all that exists is sustained, the Logos in any case ever was, is, and will be, incarnate in every sentient being.

As the Logos of God (or, as the Authorised Version of the Bible into English most inadequately renders it in the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, the Word of God) was by the philosophers called the "Intellectual Sun" and the "Light of the World",⁵⁹ being, as a personification of the Thought and Speech of the All-Father, a personification of Wisdom and Reason (which, in an even more real sense than the emanations of the physical sun, form the "Light of the World," or, as the original text of the New Testament puts it, the "Light of the Cosmos"), the fact that pre-Christian philosophers affirmed that the cross was the symbol of the said "Light of the Cosmos," is obviously one which every writer concerning the cross as a Christian symbol ought in common honesty to deal with.

That pre-Christian philosophers did so affirm, can be seen by turning to the TimÆus of Plato, where, referring to the begetting of the Universal Soul (whom Philo, another pre-Christian philosopher, speaks of as the "Second God"; and as God's "Beloved Son," "Image," "Ambassador," "Mediator," and "First-Begotten"), Plato says
"Such was the whole plan of the Eternal God about the God that was to be:—and in the centre he put the soul which he diffused throughout the body:—and he made the Universe a circle moving in a circle. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed God:—he made the soul on this wise—joined—at the centre like the letter Χ."⁶⁰

Concerning this pronouncement of the great Teacher he so revered, Proclus wrote as follows
"Two circles will be formed, of which one is interior but the other is exterior. One of these is called the circle of the Same and one the circle of the Different, or of the Fixed and of the Variable, or rather of the Equinoctial Circle and of the Zodiac. The circle of the Different revolves about the Zodiac, but the circle of the Same about the Equinoctial. Hence we conceive that the right lines are not to be applied to each other at right angles but like the letter Χ, as Plato says, so as to cause the angles to be equal only at the summit but those on each side and the successive angles to be unequal. For the Equinoctial Circle does not cut the Zodiac at right angles. Such therefore in short is the mathematical discussion of the figure of the (Universal) Soul."⁶¹

Even the Fathers of the Christian Church admitted that their ideas of the Son of God and of the cross being his symbol, were more or less derived from pre-Christian philosophers. For we find Justin Martyr remarking that Plato declared that
"The Power next to the Supreme God was figured in the shape of the letter Χ upon the universe."⁶²
And in another place this famous Father states that
"Whereas Plato, philosophising about the Son of God, says God expressed him upon the universe in the shape of the letter Χ, he evidently took the hint from Moses, who took brass and made the sign of the cross and placed it by the holy tabernacle, and declared that if people would look upon that cross and believe they would be saved."⁶³

The value of all this evidence is so obvious that its mere parade is almost sufficient.

It should however be pointed out that this cross X, being avowedly adopted by the pre-Christian philosophers as the symbol of the "Logos" or "First-begotten" of God in preference to the Plus because the zodiac or pathway of the Sun does not "cross" the equator at right angles, was clearly a solar symbol. And it may be added that though Justin Martyr is careful to claim this particular solar cross as a symbol of the Christ, no one claims that Jesus was executed upon an instrument so shaped; while the story that St. Andrew was affixed to an instrument of execution so shaped, is admittedly a worthless legend.

This claim of Justin Martyr that the solar cross of the philosophers was a pre-Christian symbol of the Christ, is, when considered in connection with the fact that nearly all the Fathers allude to the figure of the cross, any kind of cross, as a life-giving symbol from time immemorial, significant of much.