Sculpture was little practiced during the first mediæval centuries, but the church soon gave that art her patronage, and produced innumerable works. Plastic and pictorial art was from the earliest period employed in sacred places for the instruction of the people and the edification of the faithful. In 433, pope Sixtus dedicated to the "people of God" the Mosaics and sculptures in Santa Maria Maggiore, at Rome. St. John Damascenus, in the eighth century, reasoned earnestly in defense of statuary for religious purposes. "Images speak," exclaims the eloquent apologist; "they are neither mute nor lifeless blocks, like the idols of the pagans. Every figure that meets our gaze in a church relates, as if in words, the humiliation of Christ for his people, the miracles of the mother of God, the deeds and conflicts of the saints. Images open the heart and awake the intellect, and, in a marvelous and indescribable manner, engage us to imitate the persons they represent." As Catholicism advanced it was subjected to opposing influences, and the faintest shadow that darkened, or the lightest breath that disturbed, the external prosperity or the internal harmony of the church, was immediately reflected by the pencil of the artist and the chisel of the sculptor. Almost every ancient edifice, therefore, becomes to the eye of careful observation a hieroglyphic record of the dogmas believed and the changes which transpired in the course of successive ages. During the centuries intervening between the ninth and seventeenth of our era, numerous cathedrals, parish churches, and private chapels, colleges, abbeys, and priories, teemed with an almost incredible profusion of figures, images, and sacred compositions, carved, sculptured, and engraved, as the medium of devout instruction. Time and violence have done much to deface or destroy these early works, but the western states of Europe, especially France and England, are even now immensely rich in statues and other sculptured works. The majority of the French cathedrals are illustrated with a vast variety of "Mirrors" in stone; but the most complete is that which adorns the masterpiece at Chartres, which has no less than eighteen hundred and fourteen statues on the exterior alone. The sculptures here open with the creation of the world, to illustrate which thirty-six tableaux and seventy-five statues are employed, beginning with the moment when God leaves his repose to create the heavens and the earth, and is continued to that in which Adam and Eve, having been guilty of disobedience, are driven from Paradise, to pass the remainder of their lives in tears and in labor. It is the genesis of organic and inorganic nature, of living creatures and reasoning beings; that in which the biblical cosmogony is developed, and which leads to that terrible event, the fearful malediction pronounced upon man by his God. From the _Natural_ the sculptor passed to the _Moral Mirror_, and showed how that man