Introductory.

It is strange, yet unquestionably a fact, that in ages long before the birth of Christ, and since then in lands untouched by the teaching of the Church, the Cross has been used as a sacred symbol. The Aryan tribes, ancestors of most of the European nations, so regarded a cross of curious form, whose four equal arms were all turned midway at a right angle. The excavations of Dr. Schliemann on the site of ancient Troy have brought to light discs of baked clay stamped with a cross. It is well known that the crux ansata, or Tau Cross (T), sometimes with the addition of a ring, as if for suspension, at the top, is found in Egyptian inscriptions. The Greek Bacchus, the Tyrian Tammuz, the Chaldean Bel, and the Norse Odin, were all symbolized to their votaries by a cruciform device. The Spanish conquerors of Mexico found the cross already an object of reverence among the Aztecs, carved on temple walls, on amulets, and on pottery; so, too, in North America, specimens of shell-work, engraved with crosses of various forms, have been unearthed from mounds raised by the native Indian tribes.

It is further interesting to note that the sign was frequently regarded as an emblem of deity, or as a symbol of favourable import. To the Egyptians it spoke of a future life; to the Aryans of fire, itself emblematic of life; the Mongolians lay it, drawn on paper, on the breasts of their dead; and the Buddhists of Thibet see in it a mark of the foot-print of Buddha.

In all this the Christians of the first age would have rejoiced, claiming it as a world-wide prophecy of the Cross of the Redeemer, just as they drew a similar lesson from the frequency with which the cross forms, more or less roughly, the shape of the ordinary implements of man’s handicraft. “Consider all things in the world,” writes Justin Martyr, in his apology addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, “whether without this form they could be administered or could have any community. For the sea is not crossed except that trophy which is called a sail remain safe aboard the ship; nor is the earth ploughed without it; diggers and mechanics do not their work except with tools of this shape. And the human form differs from that of brute beasts in nothing but in being erect, and having the arms extended. The power of this figure is even shown by your own symbols, on what are named ‘vexilla’ and trophies, with which all your processions are made, using these, even though unwittingly, as signs of your authority and dominion.”

Although we should be unwilling to-day to accept as argument all that a pious, yet simple, fancy, or the warmth of a fervid rhetoric, suggested to men of former times; it would, nevertheless, be equally, or more absurd for us to follow others, who have endeavoured to trace the mere survival of heathen custom in the Christian use of the Cross. That such is not the case is clear, in spite of a few parallels in teaching as curious as those above referred to, from the fact that the Cross amongst us symbolizes the Faith, not as an arbitrary or mystic sign, but as the natural expression of an historical fact.

The Christians of the first two centuries, however, seldom employed any material image of the Cross, and never the Crucifix. This is only what, under the circumstances, was to be expected. To erect crosses in their houses, or to wear them on their persons, was impossible in the times of heathen ascendancy, without risking insult to the holy sign, and danger to themselves. Moreover, in days when crucifixion was still in use as the most degrading of all forms of punishment, and the cross to the world at large a more infamous figure than the gallows is now to us, it must have been difficult even for the followers of the Crucified to rise entirely above the common sentiment of their age. The absolute horror with which the “accursed tree” was regarded before hallowing associations ennobled it, is well illustrated by the exclamation of Cicero in one of his orations: “Let the very name of the cross be banished, not from the bodies only, but from the eyes, the ears, the thoughts of Roman citizens!” The earliest known attempt to depict the Crucifixion of the Saviour illustrates the fact that it was the worship of a Crucified Man which struck the contemporary heathen as especially incomprehensible. In the year 1857, a wall in the Palatine Palace at Rome, which had been hidden from sight for centuries, was laid bare, and displayed a rude sketch, which has been named the “graffito blasfemo.” Stretched on a cross is a human figure with an ass’s head, before which stands a man in a short tunic with his arms upraised, while beneath, in very roughly-formed Greek characters, runs the inscription: “Alexamenos adores his God.” The work, scratched on the wall, doubtless by some palace slave in ridicule of a comrade, is assigned to the end of the second century, and obviously alludes with blasphemous scorn to the manner of the Saviour’s death, and to the strange calumny, first flung by the Gnostics at the Jews, and then by the heathen at Jews and Christians alike, that they paid divine honours to an ass.

At this time the faithful contented themselves with a mere suggestion of the sign, such as the combined X and P, the first two letters of the name of Christ in Greek, sometimes indicating the X with a transverse stroke across the P. Nothing more definite than this, and dating from primitive times, is to be found in the many inscriptions in the Roman Catacombs, where the Christians worshipped and buried their dead down at least to A.D. 260. In their private devotions, however, and in public also if occasion demanded an open profession of the faith, they early adopted the habit of making the sacred sign. They prayed, as is shown in the caricature just described, with arms spread crosswise, and amid the tortures of martyrdom, when the savage uproar drowned their voices or their failing strength denied them power to speak, their arms crossed above their heads bore their mute testimony to the steadfastness of their faith. “In every undertaking,” writes Tertullian in the second century, “on coming in and going out, on dressing or washing, at the bringing of lights, on going to bed, in whatever occupation we are engaged, we imprint our foreheads with the sign of the Cross.” To this testimony of the universal use of the practice in the primitive ages might be added that of many of the most eminent of the fathers, as, for instance, Lactantius, S. Athanasius, S. Basil, S. Ephrem, S. Cyril of Jerusalem, and his namesake of Alexandria, S. John Chrysostom, S. Ambrose, and S. Augustine of Hippo—all writers flourishing in the fourth century of our era.

The growth of the use of the material cross was greatly accelerated by two important historical events, the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, with which we may put the claim of the Empress-mother, S. Helena, to have discovered the true Cross, and the outbreak of the Crusades.

The story of the first of these events has been recorded for us by Eusebius, the friend and biographer of Constantine, as it was told to him by the Emperor himself; and the account is too well known to require repetition in detail here. It will be sufficient to recall the fact that in the year 312 A.D., as Constantine was marching against Maxentius, a vision of the Cross, with the legend “In this sign conquer,” was vouchsafed to him, and that a dream subsequently instructed him to inscribe that symbol on the imperial banners. In obedience to this command a splendid banner was made, consisting of a cross-staff, from which, embroidered in jewels on a silken square, hung the sacred monogram; and under this standard, the labarum, the army marched to victory.From this time Christianity was not only tolerated, but placed under imperial protection; crucifixion, moreover, ceased to be employed as a form of punishment, and the Cross began to be treated with honour. A cross of gold, adorned with precious stones, was placed, by Constantine’s orders, in the chief hall of the palace; and the imperial coinage is found to bear, with increasing frequency, the holy sign. Sometimes, as in a coin of Constantius II., the Emperor is depicted holding the labarum in his hand, or, as on those of Jovianus, he carries a globe surmounted by a cross; while later emperors stamped their coinage with the cross itself, often surrounded by a laurel crown.

The fear of insult to sacred places and religious emblems being thus removed, the Christians began to build themselves churches more worthy of their holy rites than the rooms or the catacombs with which they had formerly been compelled to be content, and in the decoration of these the cross began to take its appropriate place. A couple of centuries later, in the reign of Justinian (527-565), it was even ordered that every church should have a cross surmounting it.

Closely connected with the conversion of Constantine is the alleged discovery of the true Cross by S. Helena.

It was in the year 325, the year of the first General Council of the Church, which met at Nicaea to condemn the heresy of Arius, that the Empress, endowed with ample means and with the fullest authority, went to Jerusalem and began the search for the instrument of our redemption. The site of the Crucifixion having been preserved in tradition, excavations were made on the spot, which first disclosed the Holy Sepulchre, over which, both to conceal and to desecrate the spot, a temple had been erected to Venus; and afterwards was brought to light, in a pit hard by, those venerable pieces of wood which Christendom hailed as “the very Cross,” to one of which was still affixed a board with an inscription in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

To determine the exact value of the story thus briefly summarized, is not so easy a matter as many have assumed it to be. On the one hand, no one questions the sincerity of Helena herself, nor the fact that she actually did find the wood in the excavations which she had made. S. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing from that spot no more than twenty years later, refers to the event, and most of the fathers and chroniclers of the Church who follow him notice it, both he and they evidently accepting as facts the claims made on behalf of the wood. Moreover, it is not without its bearing on the matter that the date of the discovery coincides with a great crisis in the Arian controversy, when the eagerness of the heretics to attack and discredit the Catholics in any and every way would present a special difficulty to any attempt to pass off a fraud upon Christendom. And, finally, it is not easy to see who could plan and carry out so vast a deception in the face of all the persons of authority both in Church and State, who were then in Jerusalem; nor the object which the deception would be intended to attain. The great argument on the other side, and one difficult to overcome, and impossible to ignore, is the silence of Eusebius on the subject; yet he was present in Jerusalem at the actual time of the discovery, or very shortly afterwards, and in his life of Constantine he records others of the works undertaken in the Holy City by that Emperor through his mother, such as the erection of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is impossible but that Eusebius knew of the assertion with which Jerusalem and the world rang, that the wood discovered was the true Cross, yet he makes no allusion to it.

Whatever conclusion we moderns may come to on the matter, it is beyond question that all Christendom at that time accepted the story as true, and greeted the sacred wood with unbounded enthusiasm; and the devotion thus excited cannot fail to have had a marked influence on the use of the figure of the Cross.

A new chapter in the development of this use is begun at the Crusades, and to these the subsequent history of this world-famed wood naturally leads us.

The greater portion of “the true Cross” was kept at Jerusalem, in the church reared by Constantine, and dedicated with great solemnity in 335. It was in time richly adorned with gold and jewels, and was exposed for the veneration of the faithful every Easter Sunday. Nearly three centuries later, in 614, Chosroes, King of Persia, after victorious campaigns in Asia Minor and in Egypt, descended on the Holy Land with a tumultuous host of barbarians. The City of Jerusalem was taken and sacked, after ninety thousand Christians had fallen fighting in its defence; and the Cross was carried off in triumph by the heathen conqueror.

So bold an assault both on the Faith and on the Empire could not be brooked, and in 629, at a great battle on the plains of Nineveh, the Persian power was destroyed by the Emperor Heraclius, and the Cross recovered. With all solemnity the sacred relic was borne back to its former resting place, the Emperor himself, bare of head and foot, carrying it on his shoulders into the city.

Again was Jerusalem captured in 637, now by the newborn Mohammedan power, but the Cross was not molested, and for four hundred years it was the object of Christendom’s special devotion, pilgrims from every country in Europe, and of all grades of society, coming in countless numbers to kneel before it, and in many cases to die within reach of it. But in the year 1009, a Caliph of Egypt arose, in the person of El Hakim, to whose fierce and fanatical spirit the toleration hitherto granted to the Christians was hateful, and in the name of the prophet he invaded Palestine and took Jerusalem. The churches built by Constantine and Helena over the sacred sites were utterly destroyed, and the Cross barely escaped the same fate; faithful bands, however, succeeded in carrying it off and concealing it, and for almost a century it was but rarely and cautiously exhibited.

At last the trumpet call of Peter the Hermit rang out across Europe, and an army, full of enthusiasm, and led by a band of almost ideal heroes, started up in answer. Whatever faults marred the actions of the Crusaders, and however soiled by human ambitions and personal jealousies later expeditions might be, the first Crusade was inspired by a genuine zeal for a cause that all held to be holy—the rescuing of the places sanctified by the Saviour’s life and death from the pollution of unbelievers, and especially the bringing back of the Cross to its place of honour. On Friday, July 13th, 1099, the Christian armies entered the city, and the Cross, uplifted on Calvary, became the centre, almost the raison d’Étre, of the new kingdom of Jerusalem.

But the time of its disappearance from the earth was not far distant. Godfrey, the first king of that almost mystic kingdom, was buried beside it on the right, and Baldwin, his successor, on the left, and the guardianship of the holy places had fallen into hands less conscious of the sacredness of their office, when Saladin invaded the land in 1187. The last stand of the Christians, under Guy, the unworthy successor of the early kings, was made at Hattin, and the sacred wood of the Cross itself was borne into the camp to inspire them with courage and devotion; but the spirit of the old Crusaders was dead, and the infidel was completely triumphant.

A few years later, in 1192, we hear of the Cross as still in Saladin’s possession, and as shewn by his permission to some favoured pilgrims, among whom was the Bishop of Salisbury, and then it disappears from history; the sacred wood that thousands had braved the perils of seas and Alpine passes to gaze upon, that myriads had gladly died to protect, vanished from the eyes of men, whither none can say.

Nothing now remains of the most highly-prized relic which the world has ever held, except numerous fragments of the wood preserved in cathedrals and elsewhere throughout Europe, some score or more of nails purporting to be those which fixed the hands and feet of the Lord, and the board with its trilingual inscription. The sneer that there is enough wood of the true Cross to build a man-of-war has become a common-place, but it proves only the ignorance of those who repeat it; the fragments being all of the smallest dimensions, few as large as a pin, many no larger than a pin’s head. The nails were probably most of them made as copies of the originals, and in course of time have come to be regarded as genuine. The famous iron crown of Lombardy has been said to enshrine a holy nail, but the claim is no older than the sixteenth century. The inscription is in the church of Santa Croce at Rome, and the question of its genuineness stands exactly on a level with that of the Cross itself: whether or no it be the veritable board which hung above the head of the Crucified, there can be little doubt that it is the one unearthed by S. Helena more than fifteen hundred years ago.

It is from the period of the Crusades especially that we must date the wide-spread erection of crosses and use of cross-forms throughout Europe. Worn as a badge or charm, worked in silk or chaced in metal, towering in stone by the wayside or overshadowing the busy market, gleaming on banners, or resplendent in jewels in the solemnity of the Church,—everywhere the holy sign met the eye.

One use of the Christian emblem was directly due to Crusading influence. The union in the expeditions against the infidels of knights of many lands and different languages gave its origin, or at any rate its organized form, to the science of heraldry; and the spirit which presided at its birth is shown in the immense variety of crosses recognised in its vocabulary. We have the Latin Cross, the ordinary cross of suffering; the Greek Cross with its equal arms; the Cross of S. Andrew, or the saltire (X); the Maltese, or eight-pointed cross; the Tau, or Egyptian Cross (T); and others which a persistent ingenuity of invention has almost endlessly varied.

It is well known that every Crusader of whatever rank had a cross of some material stitched to his tunic; but three great orders of knighthood arose during the “Holy War,” who made it their peculiar badge, as they were pre-eminently the champions of the Cross. The Knights of the Hospital of S. John at Jerusalem, or Knights of Malta, or of Rhodes, commonly called simply the Hospitallers, were founded in 1048, and were habited in black mantles with a white cross on the left breast, scarlet surcoats with similar crosses on back and front, and each wore the same emblem in gold suspended by a black ribbon from his neck. The Brethren of the Temple at Jerusalem, or Templars, founded in 1128, wore white mantles with red crosses, and carried banners of black and white charged with a cross in red. The Teutonic Knights, more properly the Knights of the Hospital of our Ladye of Mount Zion at Jerusalem, assumed a black cross as their badge.

In this connection it is interesting to note how prominent a place the emblem of the Christian Faith still holds in the ensigns and honourable distinctions of the world. The decorations of the British orders of the Garter, the Bath, the Thistle, and of S. Patrick, all consist of, or comprise, a cross, as of course does the coveted Victoria Cross. The same is true of the French Legion of Honour, the Prussian Black Eagle, Red Eagle, and Iron Cross, the Russian orders of S. Andrew, S. Alexander Newski, and the White Eagle, the Austrian orders of Maria Theresa, and of S. Stephen, the orders of FidelitÉ of Baden, of S. Hubert of Bavaria, of S. James and of the Calatrava of Spain, and of the Annonciade of Italy. Similarly the arms, or ensigns, or both, of Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, and Switzerland, all display the sign of our Redemption, the most conspicious of them all being the Union Jack, with its combined crosses of S. George of England, S. Andrew of Scotland, and S. Patrick of Ireland. It is not a little remarkable that during the brief period of the Puritan ascendancy, when the royal arms were discarded, although the Church was overthrown, the crosses of the patron saints were kept, and from them were formed the shield of the Commonwealth.

Evidence of the triumph of the Cross is given by the regalia of almost every Christian kingdom, where the jewelled cross surmounts the monarch’s crown and sceptre, stands on the orb, and is engraved upon his signet; but no more universal recognition of the sign is to be found than in the coinage of Christendom. We have seen that shortly after the conversion of Constantine, the Christian symbol began to appear on the coins of the Empire, and the practice afterwards became general throughout Europe. This arose, probably, partly from a wish to testify to the faith of the sovereign and of his people, but partly also in the hope that those who were tempted to deface or to clip the coin might be deterred by the sight of the holy sign. The English silver pennies and nobles were almost all stamped with a cross on the reverse, reaching from edge to edge: the deiners of France, the pistoles of Spain, were similarly marked; but fully to illustrate the fact would be to catalogue a great portion of the mintage of mediÆval, and some of modern Europe.

Thus wide and varied in interest is the field over which the Cross of Christ has flung its illuminating influence.