We may roughly fix the date of the rebirth of sculpture at 1000 A.D. Scientific accuracy would perhaps demand references to Charlemagne. The historian of art, however, seeks causes of the greatest magnitude. He must point to vast eruptions of human energy and emotion, not to brick upon brick erections of paltry feelings, if he is to really account for the creation of a great art. We are, therefore, safe in starting from the feverish anxiety with which Christendom awaited the advent of the year 1000 after our Lord. The Millennium had expired. Satan was to be loosed. Men knew not what to expect. He who made a will or executed a deed started with such a phrase as “Seeing that the end of the world is at hand.” The very indefiniteness of the fears only served to increase the terror. Month after month crept by. Nothing untoward happened. At last the mystic year passed. The revulsion of feeling was immense, the immediate result being an enormous devotional impulse, the evidence of which remains to-day in the great number of ecclesiastical buildings erected in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Let us not be misunderstood. The year 1000 A.D. was not the cause of the new spirit. It simply marks the time. To understand why the men of these centuries instinctively lavished wealth and labour upon the cathedrals and abbeys and their sculptured decorations, we must picture the social and political state of Western Europe at the time. During the years following the break up of the Empire hordes of heathen invaders had poured into the Roman world. The torrent was not stayed until the age of Charles the Great. The first result of the beating of this human tide upon the rocks of the old civilization had been a fund of nervous energy unequalled since the struggle with Carthage had produced vital force sufficient to enable Rome to conquer and rule the Western world. But this fund of energy needed concentration and direction. Politically, Western Europe in the eleventh century was a heterogeneous collection of feudal states. It was soon evident that the only common interests were those aroused by the belief in a common religious creed. In the midst of a general social chaos, the only really organized community was the Catholic Church. What wonder then that, in search for some sure resting-place, Christendom submitted itself to Rome? By the time of Gregory VII. (1073 A.D.) the occupant of the Chair of St. Peter had become all-powerful. Hobbes’ picture of the Papacy—the ghost of the Empire sitting crowned on its own grave—had been realized to the full. As the Festival at Olympia had been the rallying-point for the Greek world, so the meeting at Clermont, where the First Crusade was inaugurated, witnessed to the only unity Christendom could then imagine. This is why the artistic energies of Western Europe after 1000 A.D. followed channels suggested by the Roman Church. THE GOTHIC SCULPTORS