“I tell you, that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.”[355]
“On a bank near the shore,” says Cordiner, in his Antiquities of Scotland, “opposite to the ruins of a castellated house, called Sandwick (in Ross-shire), and about three miles east from Ferns, a very splendid obelisk is erected, surrounded at the base with large, well-cut flag stones, formed like steps. Both sides of this column are elaborately covered with various enrichments, in well-finished carved work. The one face presents a sumptuous cross, with a figure of St. Andrew on each hand, and some uncouth animals and flowerings underneath. The central division, on the reverse, renders it a piece of antiquity well worthy of preservation; there is exhibited on that such a variety of figures, birds, and animals, as seemed what might prove a curious subject of investigation; I have, therefore, given a distinct delineation of them at the foot of the column, on a larger scale, that their shapes might be distinctly ascertained, and the more probable conjectures formed of their allusion.”
What, on earth, business would St. Andrew have in company with “uncouth animals?” What have “birds,” “figures,” and “flowerings” to do with Christianity? If this “obelisk” had not been erected here, in commemorative deification, centuries upon centuries before the era of his Saintship’s birth, why should the “cross,” which “one face presents,” be decorated with “enrichments” brought all the way from Egypt?
Look at these hieroglyphics: and where will you find anything congenial to them within the empire of the Romans? Here is the Bulbul of Iran,[356] the boar of Vishnu, the elk, the fox, the lamb, and the dancers. All the other configurations, without going through them in detail, are not only, in their nature and import, essentially eastern, but are actually the symbols of the various animal-forms under which they contemplated the properties of the Godhead. As the cross, however, is that to which we are more immediately directed, I shall confine myself, for the present, to the establishment of its antiquity.
No one will question but that Venus was antecedent to the days of St. Andrew; and she is represented with a cross and a circle![357] Jupiter also, it will be admitted, was anterior to his time; and we find him delineated with a cross and a horn! Saturn is said to have been sire to the last-mentioned god, and, by the laws of primogeniture, must have been senior to him; yet we find him also pictured with a cross and horn! The monogram of Osiris is a cross! On a medal of one of the Ptolemies is to be seen an eagle conveying a thunderbolt with the cross! In short, all through the ancient world this symbol was to be encountered, and wherever it presented itself, it was always the harbinger of sanctity and of peace.
Can we glean from their writings any confirmation to my development as to the origin of the rite? Plato asserts, that the form of the letter X was imprinted upon the universe.[358] I know how this has been interpreted as a reference to the Son of God, and the second power of the Divinity. I will not make use of it in any such light, preferring to avoid everything that may seem equivocal, yet am I well convinced that, under the philosopher’s ratiocination, may be seen the twinkling trace of a previous incarnation of the λογος, and a crucifixion, likewise, as an atonement for the sins of humanity.
“Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
“But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.”[359]
This is all in the past tense; bearing reference, irrefutably, to a former occurrence, but including also, in the sequel, the idea of a future reappearance. And if you look back at the effigy, [page 296], will it not sensitively prove him to have been “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief?”[360]