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At the commencement of this work it was shown that, as the Greek text of the writings forming the New Testament testifies, not one of the Apostles or Evangelists ever stated that Jesus was executed upon a cross-shaped instrument of execution. The circumstances under which the figure of the cross became the symbol of our religion, were then made clear.
There are no signs of animal life, except traces of the wadan. For two days, they tell us, we are to have little or no water. Now and then we pass desert mosques, square, or circular, or cross-shaped walls of stone, some with two entrances, built for the devotion of chance passengers. The mountains on the east are called El Magheelaghen. To-day we carried my trunk with the money.
The only tattooing that they wear on the forehead, on the back of the hand, is a cross with four equal branches; the pummels of their saddles, the handles of their sabres, of their poignards, are cross-shaped. And is it necessary to remind you that, although Islam forbids bells as a sign of Christianity, the harness of Tuareg camels are trimmed with bells?
If you will look closely at the back ones, you will see that each of them has four corners, or cusps, with a cross-shaped, sunken furrow in the centre, where they come together. After they have been used in grinding food for some years and rubbing against each other, these little corner projections become worn away, and their tops become almost flat.
A transversal cleft makes its appearance on the forehead, at the bottom of the perforating diadem; a second, but longitudinal slit divides the skull in two and extends down the thorax. Through this cross-shaped opening, the Anthrax suddenly appears, all moist with the humors of life's laboratory.
Then she took them both by the hand and led them out to the churchyard; and passing where two mounds lay close together, she said: "There are your parents!" The children looked at each other in surprise. Marianne then made a cross-shaped furrow in each of the mounds, and showed the children how to stick the berries in.
Here, however, bells of pottery in many shapes are found little bells, with handles like the upper part of a human figure; larger bells, with curious flat handles set transversely; others, still larger, like cow-bells in size and tone, and curious cross-shaped bells, really a group of four united.
He would sit down in the forest: wait until the oaks and beeches and elms about him were filled with sparrows and finches and wrens; and then tell of the dying love of Him who made them. And, as they flew away, he loved to fancy that they formed themselves into a cross-shaped cloud above him, and that the songs that they sang were the rapt expression of their adoring worship.
He moreover discovered that no one has ever written a complete history of the symbol, showing the possibility that the stauros or post to which Jesus was affixed was not cross-shaped, and the certainty that, in any case, what eventually became the symbol of our faith owed some of its prestige as a Christian symbol of Victory and Life to the position it occupied in pre-Christian days.
The sign of the cross as traced upon the forehead in the non-Mosaic initiatory rite of baptism seems to be what is referred to; and no representation of an instrument of execution, or cross-shaped symbol of wood or any material, is once mentioned. In another of Tertullian's works we come across the passage "In all the actions of daily life we trace upon the forehead the sign."
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