To determine the exact value of the story thus briefly summarized, is not so easy a matter as many have assumed it to be. On the one hand, no one questions the sincerity of Helena herself, nor the fact that she actually did find the wood in the excavations which she had made. S. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing from that spot no more than twenty years later, refers to the event, and most of the fathers and chroniclers of the Church who follow him notice it, both he and they evidently accepting as facts the claims made on behalf of the wood. Moreover, it is not without its bearing on the matter that the date of the discovery coincides with a great crisis in the Arian controversy, when the eagerness of the heretics to attack and discredit the Catholics in any and every way would present a special difficulty to any attempt to pass off a fraud upon Christendom. And, finally, it is not easy to see who could plan and carry out so vast a deception in the face of all the persons of authority both in Church and State, who were then in Jerusalem; nor the object which the deception would be intended to attain. The great argument on the other side, and one difficult to overcome, and impossible to ignore, is the silence of Eusebius on the subject; yet he was present in Jerusalem at the actual time of the discovery, or very shortly afterwards, and in his life of Constantine he records others of the works undertaken in the Holy City by that Emperor through his mother, such as the erection of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is impossible but that Eusebius knew of the assertion with which Jerusalem and the world rang, that the wood discovered was the true Cross, yet he makes no allusion to it. Whatever conclusion we moderns may come to on the matter, it is beyond question that all Christendom at that time accepted the story as true, and greeted the sacred wood with unbounded enthusiasm; and the devotion thus excited cannot fail to have had a marked influence on the use of the figure of the Cross. A new chapter in the development of this use is begun at the Crusades, and to these the subsequent history of this world-famed wood naturally leads us. The greater portion of "the true Cross" was kept at Jerusalem, in the church reared by Constantine, and dedicated with great solemnity in 335. It was in time richly adorned with gold and jewels, and was exposed for the veneration of the faithful every Easter Sunday. Nearly three centuries later, in 614, Chosroes, King of Persia, after victorious campaigns in Asia Minor and in Egypt, descended on the Holy Land with a tumultuous host of barbarians. The City of Jerusalem was taken and sacked, after ninety thousand Christians had fallen fighting in its defence; and the Cross was carried off in triumph by the heathen conqueror.