Lactantius — Divine Institutes 4.26
I have spoken about humility and frailty and suffering — why God preferred to undergo these. Now the reason of the cross itself must be given and its force told. What the highest Father disposed from the beginning, and how he ordered all things that were done, is taught not only by the prophets’ foretelling, which truly went ahead into Christ, but also by the reason of the passion itself. For whatever he suffered was not empty, but had a great figure and meaning — just as those divine works he did also did: their force and power were effective for the present, yet they also declared something for the future.
He was — that is, innocent and just and holy — who, sacrificed by those same Jews, is for salvation to all who have written on their own forehead the sign of the blood, that is, of the cross by which he poured out blood. For the forehead is the human’s highest threshold, and wood smeared with blood is a signification of the cross. Finally the immolation of the animal by those who keep the Passover is named from “to suffer,” because it is a figure of the passion, which God, foreknowing things to come, handed over through Moses for his people to celebrate. But then the figure prevailed in the present toward driving away danger, so that it might appear how much the truth itself would prevail toward protecting God’s people in the extreme necessity of the whole world.
Latin
Dixi de humilitate et fragilitate et passione, cur haec deus subire maluerit: nunc ipsius crucis ratio reddenda est et uis enarranda. quid summus pater a principio disposuerit et quemadmodum cuncta quae gesta sunt ordinarit, non tantum diuinatio prophetarum, quae in Christum uera praecessit, sed etiam ratio ipsius passionis docet. quaecumque enim passus est, non fuerunt inania, sed habuerunt figuram et significantiam magnam sicut etiam diuina illa opera quae fecit: quorum uis et potentia ualebat quidem in praesens, sed declarabat aliquid in futurum. fuit, id est innocens et iustus et sanctus, qui ab isdem Iudaeis immolatus saluti est omnibus, qui signum sanguinis, id est crucis qua sanguinem fudit, in sua fronte conscripserint. frons enim summum limen est hominis et lignum sanguine delibutum crucis significatio est. denique immolatio pecudis ab iis ipsis qui faciunt pascha nominatur ἀπὸ τοῦ πάσχειν , quia passionis figura est, quam deus praescius futurorum tradidit per Moysen populo suo celebrandam. sed tum figura ualuit in praesenti ad depellendum periculum, ut appareret quantum ueritas ipsa ualitura sit ad plebem dei protegendam in extrema totius orbis necessitate.