conceiving ours, as the only non-national religion with ramifications
throughout his world-wide dominions, to be the only one that could weld
together the many nations which acknowledged his sway, established
Christianity as the State Religion of the Roman Empire, the Church to
which we belong would naturally have had to accept as its own the
symbols which Constantine had caused to be those of the State in
question. And it should be added that the cross of later days with one
of its arms longer than the others, if not also the assumption that the
stauros to which Jesus was affixed had a cross-bar, may have been
merely the outcome of a wish to associate with the story of Jesus these
Gaulish symbols of victory which had become symbols of the Roman State,
and therefore of its State Church.

Anyway, the first kind of cross venerated by Christians was not a
representation of an instrument of execution; and the fact that we hold
sacred many different kinds of crosses, although even if we could prove
that the stauros to which Jesus was affixed had a cross-bar but one
kind could be a representation of that instrument of execution, has to
be accounted for.

Our only plausible explanation of the fact that we hold sacred almost
any species of cross is that, as we do not know what kind of cross
Jesus died upon, opinions have always differed as to which was the real
cross.

This difference of opinion among Christians as to the shape of the
instrument upon which Jesus was executed, has certainly existed for
many centuries. But as an explanation of the many different kinds of
crosses accepted by us as symbols of the Christ, it only lands us in a
greater difficulty. For if we did not know what kind of cross Jesus