Phoenicians.

CHAPTER V.

THE PYRAMID, THE CROSS, AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN.

No fact is better established than the reverence shown to the sign of
the Cross in all the ages prior to Christianity. We cannot do better
than quote from an able article in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1870,
upon this question:

"From the dawn of organized Paganism in the Eastern world to the final
establishment of Christianity in the Western, the Cross was undoubtedly
one of the commonest and most sacred of symbolical monuments; and, to a
remarkable extent, it is so still in almost every land where that of
Calvary is unrecognized or unknown. Apart from any distinctions of
social or intellectual superiority, of caste, color, nationality, or
location in either hemisphere, it appears to have been the aboriginal
possession of every people in antiquity--the elastic girdle, so to say,
which embraced the most widely separated heathen communities--the most
significant token of a universal brotherhood, to which all the families
of mankind were severally and irresistibly drawn, and by which their
common descent was emphatically expressed, or by means of which each and
all preserved, amid every vicissitude of fortune, a knowledge of the
primeval happiness and dignity of their species. Where authentic history
is silent on the subject, the material relics of past and long since
forgotten races are not wanting to confirm and strengthen this
supposition. Diversified forms of the symbol are delineated more or less
artistically, according to the progress achieved in civilization at the
period, on the ruined walls of temples and palaces, on natural rocks and