before Jesus was executed, and so far as we are told never had anything
to do with a cross, is represented in our religious pictures as holding
a cross.

The second question was whether this curious but perhaps in itself
easily explained practice had in its inception any connection with the
non-Mosaic initiatory rite of baptism; which Jesus accepted as a matter
of course at the hands of his cousin John, and in which the sign of the
cross has for ages been the all-important feature. And it was the
wonder whether there was or was not some association between the facts
that the New Testament writers give no explanation whatever of the
origin of baptism as an initiatory rite, that this non-Mosaic
initiatory rite was in use among Sun-God worshippers long before our
era, and that the Fathers admitted that the followers of the Persian
conception of the Sun-God marked their initiates upon the forehead like
the followers of the Christ, which finally induced the author to start
a systematic enquiry into the history of the cross as a symbol.

The third question was why, despite the fact that the instrument of
execution to which Jesus was affixed can have had but one shape, almost
any kind of cross is accepted as a symbol of our faith.

The last of the four questions was why many varieties of the cross of
four equal arms, which certainly was not a representation of an
instrument of execution, were accepted by Christians as symbols of the
Christ before any cross which could possibly have been a representation
of an instrument of execution was given a place among the symbols of
Christianity; while even nowadays one variety of the cross of four
equal arms is the favourite symbol of the Greek Church, and both it and
the other varieties enter into the ornamentation of our sacred