And, passing from the symbol to the deity represented, let us remember that it is recorded that various Christian paintings of ancient times bore upon them the dedicatory words DEO SOLI. For this remarkable legend means both "To God alone" and "To the Sun-God," both
"To the Sole God" and "To the God Sol;" and forcibly reminds us, not only of the prayer which Constantine caused his troops to repeat, but also of that fine address to the "universally adored" Sun-God commencing
"Latium calls thee Sol because in honour thou
art Solitary,
After the Father."[58]
Now, as will be shown further on, a cross of some description or other was in every land accepted as the symbol of the universally adored Sun-God. And while not a single one of the many books forming the New Testament states that Jesus was executed upon a cross-shaped instrument, and the first crosses Christians used as signs or symbols bore every form but that which a cross-shaped instrument of execution would have borne, the Christians of the fourth century, as we have seen, went out of their way to claim even the so-called Monogram of Christ as a cross; Eusebius so carefully speaking of it as such even where he relates that Constantine and his soldiers saw
it above the meridian sun, that one might not unreasonably imagine him to be claiming it as Christian because it was more or less cruciform and therefore more or less like the world-wide symbol of the Sun-God.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
THE CROSS OF THE LOGOS.
Having made clear the part played by Constantine in the prominence given in his lifetime to the cross as a symbol of the Roman Empire and therefore of what he made its State Religion, and having also shown that while the Christian chroniclers of those days are silent concerning the various forms of crosses placed by Constantine upon his coins they went out of their way to allude to the so-called Monogram of Christ as a cross, to claim it as such, and even to associate it with the sun, let us now turn our attention again to the pre-Christian cross.
So great was the veneration in which that phallic and solar symbol the cross was held in the ages which preceded the birth and death of Jesus, that the philosophers of those days even
went so far as to declare that the cross was the figure of the Life or Soul of the Universe.
Though it is a matter of very considerable importance, we Christians for some reason or other ignore the fact that long before our era commenced philosophers thus conceived the figure of the cross to be the symbol of the Logos of God.