“It used to be believed by the vulgar,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, “that there were enough pieces of this ‘true cross’ to built a battleship.” Waugh disagreed: “In the last century a French savant, Charles Rohault de Fleury, went to the great trouble of measuring them all. He found a total of 4,000,000 cubic millimeters, whereas the cross on which our Lord suffered would probably comprise some 178,000,000.”
He concludes: “As far as volume goes, therefore, there is no strain on the credulity of the faithful.”
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