The most noteworthy features of the available evidence illustrative of the real origin and history of the symbol of the cross have now been placed before the reader, but a number of more or less miscellaneous facts directly or indirectly throwing additional light upon the subject have still to be drawn attention to.

For instance, no mention has yet been made of the HermÆ of bygone ages. And although their origin may have had no connection with the symbol in question, it is noteworthy that some at least of the early Christians discovered in the more or less cruciform outline of the HermÆ a reason or excuse for paying them homage, while very similar figures are to be seen illustrated upon Christian antiquities, such as the mosaic of which the great cross of the Lateran forms the principal feature.

The HermÆ venerated by the ancient Greeks were pillars, usually of stone and quadrangular, surmounted in most instances with a head of either Hermes or Dionysos; and with a peculiar transverse rail just below the head, much used for hanging garlands upon, which made the whole look more or less like a cross.

These pillars were erected in front of temples, tombs, and houses; but more especially as sign posts at cross roads; and whether the head at the top was that of Hermes the Messenger of the Gods, or, as was very often the case, that of Dionysos the Sun-God, a phallus was always a prominent feature.

Moreover these phallic and often solar erections called HermÆ, undoubtedly more or less cross-shaped owing to the transverse rail, were worshipped as conducive to fecundity.

It is also worthy of notice that the cross is well known to have been venerated in America before even the Norsemen who preceded Columbus set foot upon that afterwards rediscovered continent.

For instance a cross surrounded by a circle was in use among the ancient Mexicans as a solar sign, another cross was a solar symbol of the natives of Peru from time immemorial, and we are also told by the authorities that a cross of four equal arms with a disc or circle at the centre was the age-old Moqui symbol of the Sun.⁶⁸

Other noteworthy points are that the cross occurs upon Runic monuments in Europe long before Christianity was introduced into the regions containing them; that ancient altars to the Sun-God Mithras bearing the sacred symbol of the cross have been discovered even in England; and that the Laplanders of old when sacrificing marked their idols with the symbol of the cross, using the life blood of their victims for that purpose.⁶⁹

It should also be pointed out that on a coin of Thasos bearing representations of a phallic character connected with the worship of the Thracian Bacchus, a Svastika cross is a prominent symbol; that upon ancient vases the headgear of Bacchus is sometimes ornamented with the cross of four equal arms; that upon a Greek vase at Lentini, Sicily, an ancient representation of the Sun-God Hercules is accompanied by no less than three different kinds of crosses as symbols; and that upon an archaic Greek vase in the British Museum, the Svastika cross, the St. Andrew's cross, and the other and right angled cross of four equal arms, appear under the rays of the Sun. Nor should it be forgotten that though the Svastika cross has almost died out as a Christian symbol and was perhaps never thoroughly acclimatised as such, it often appeared upon Christian ecclesiastical properties of the Middle Ages, and, either as a Pagan or Christian symbol, continually occurs in the catacombs of Rome.

We are told that circular wafers or cakes were used in the mysteries of the Sun-God Bacchus, and, being marked with a cross, resembled the disc-like wafers of the Christian Mass. Whether this was so or not, it is noteworthy that a cross is said to appear upon the representation of a circular wafer used in the mysteries of Mithras which occurs upon an ancient fresco at Rome.

In this connection it may be mentioned, as a series of curious coincidences, that in the Zoroastrian religion long before our era the Sun-God Mithras bore much the same relation to the All-Father that the Christ does in ours, and is referred to in the Zend Avesta as the Incarnate Word; that Mithras is said, like the Christ, to have been born in a cave; that the Fathers admitted that the new-born Sun had been worshipped in the cave at Bethlehem to which the story of the birth of Jesus referred; and that in framing its calendar our Church fixed upon the recognised birthday of Mithras, the Natalis Invicti of the Roman Brumalia, as the birthday of the Christ.

It is also noteworthy that the Christ is thus said to have been born as well as to have risen again the third or fourth ("After three days," Matt, xxvii. 63; after "Three days and three nights," Matt, xii. 40) day. For the birthday of Mithras and afterwards of the Christ, known to us as Christmas day, seems to have been fixed upon as the third or fourth day after the winter solstice, and as that upon which the sun's resurrection from the south was first discernible after its apparent cessation of movement or death.

In this connection it should be added that Lucian records the fact that the Sun-God referred to by the Fathers as worshipped at Bethlehem was lamented as dead once a year and always acclaimed as alive again the third day; that in several places in the Zend Avesta we meet with passages which show that the Mithras worshippers of old believed that at the death of a man his spirit sits at the head of the corpse for three days and three nights, and then, at dawn, rises free from all earthly attachments; and that we say that the execution of Jesus took place at the time of the Passover or Vernal Equinox, while instead of the prophesied "three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt. xii. 40) the period between the death and burial on Good Friday evening and the resurrection before dawn on Easter Sunday is just about that during which the Sun's disc is at the Vernal Equinox transfixed by the Equator, viz., 32 2/3 hours.

The question why the Cock so often, like the Cross, surmounts the steeples wherewith we adorn our Christian churches, is brought before us by the fact that it was in ancient days a well-known symbol both of the generative powers and of the Sun-God; often appearing as such upon the top of a sacred pillar in Assyrian and Babylonian representations of priests in the act of sacrificing or worshipping. It was probably as the "herald of the dawn" that this bird became a symbol of the Sun-God, and it would seem that we place its effigy aloft with the same idea in view.

Another point to be noted is that in the Kunthistorisches Museum at Vienna is an ancient vase upon which is a representation of the Sun-God Apollo bearing upon his breast as his one ornament and symbol a Svastika cross.

We are reminded of the facts that we Christians were once in the habit of alluding to the cross as the Tree of Life, and that the ancients dressed up the trunks of trees and worshipped them as symbols of life and growth, by an Attic vase of the fifth century B.C. Upon this is a red coloured painting of a tree so dressed, on which is to be seen near the top a head of the Sun-God Dionysos, and surrounding the trunk a shirt or garment covered with crosses.

As to the evidence obtained from the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, it is said that much which is of a phallic character has been, from quite worthy motives, kept in the background. An important fact has however been mentioned by Mr. C. W. King, M.A., in his well known work on the Gnostics and, their Remains, and this at least can be commented upon. He tells us that the Cross and the Phallus were found placed in juxtaposition upon the walls as meaning one and the same thing, and he goes on to add that
"This cross seems to be the Egyptian Tau, that ancient symbol of the generative power and therefore transferred into the Bacchic mysteries."

The foregoing are the last of the evidences throwing light upon the origin and history of the symbol adopted by our religion as its own, which the author thinks it necessary to bring forward in support of his contention. And however much of the evidence sought out by the author and in this work marshalled by him into something like order may seem by itself to be untrustworthy or worthless, no reader can reasonably deny that it has been proved that the cross was a well known symbol of Life long before our era, and that as a whole the evidence tends to show that it became such as a phallic symbol, and therefore as a symbol of the Sun-God.

And what is the moral of the real, as distinguished from the imaginary, history of the symbol of the cross but this: that from the beginning nought has caused the beliefs of men to assume an appearance of radical difference, save the difference in the name or dress with which this or that set of men have clothed similar ideas?

For, as has already been hinted, Humanity has ever had but one God and but one Religion. And as from one point of view Life is but another term for the Real Presence, and Death but another term for the withdrawal of Deity, it may be said that that God is Life, and that Religion the desire for Life, more Life, and fuller Life. Moreover, as has been said before, this universal worship of Life is discernible even in the willingness of some to sacrifice what remains to them of mortal life in the hope of thus being enabled to lay hold of a life immortal which is not for all.

The worship of Life is natural, and must of necessity continue. Let us however render it nobler by recognising its catholicity; and by contemptuously refusing to either seek or accept a life of bliss hereafter which any of our brothers and sisters are, either in our imagination or in reality, to be debarred from sharing.