Since on the Four Evangelists, as the witnesses and interpreters of a revealed religion, the whole Christian Church may be said to rest as upon four majestic pillars, we cannot be surprised that representations of them should abound, and that their effigies should have been introduced into Christian places of worship, from very early times. Generally, we find them represented together, grouped, or in a series; sometimes in their collective character, as the _Four Witnesses_; sometimes in their individual character, each as an inspired teacher, or beneficent patron. As no authentic resemblances of these sacred personages have ever been known or even supposed to exist, such representations have always been either _symbolical_ or _ideal_. In the symbol, the aim was to embody, under some emblematical image, the spiritual mission; in the ideal portrait, the artist, left to his own conception, borrowed from Scripture some leading trait (when Scripture afforded any authority for such), and adding, with what success his skill could attain, all that his imagination could conceive, as expressive of dignity and persuasive eloquence—the look ‘commercing with the skies,’ the commanding form, the reverend face, the ample draperies—he put the book or the pen into his hand, and thus the writer and the teacher of the truth was placed before us. The earliest type under which the Four Evangelists are figured is an emblem of the simplest kind: four scrolls placed in the four angles of a Greek cross, or four books (the Gospels), represented allegorically those who wrote or promulgated them. The second type chosen was more poetical—the four rivers which had their source in Paradise: representations of this kind, in which the Saviour, figured as a lamb holding the cross, or in his human form, with a lamb near him, stands on an eminence, from which gush four rivers or fountains, are to be met with in the catacombs, on ancient sarcophagi preserved among the Christian relics in the Vatican, and in several old churches constructed between the second and the fifth century.