Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

suggests that he thought the Reformation a spiritual irrelevance and that the fabric of a
Gothic church was ineradicably permeated with the truth of the old faith.
What, in detail, Sara Losh believed about the relationship between faith and
artefacts it is impossible now to know. That her belief in such a connection was both
more profound and different in character from those of the majority of her fellow
Anglicans, including those who used antiquities in the furnishing of churches, was
established in the previous chapter. Her use of symbolism, too, has been discussed in the
context of the architecture of her church. Here it is perhaps necessary to do no more than
remind ourselves that while the greater part of the religious debate in the first half of the
nineteenth century revolved around the Reformation and the rights and wrongs of the
Church of Rome, there was in Cumbria at least one antiquary whose relationship with the
artefacts of the past led her beyond such relatively narrow historical concerns towards a
more nearly universal spirituality.
If, however, there was a possible connection between Roman Catholic doctrine
and a mystical view of the past, it was certainly not a necessary one. Nothing could have
been more inimical to John Lingard. Lingard, like Milner, built his own chapel next to his
house in Hornby, Lancashire but it was a simple, neo-classical building. Writing to his
friend the Rev Robert Tate, a priest at the seminary at Ushaw, where Pugin was building
a Gothic chapel Lingard was, as seen in the previous chapter, impatient with the attempt
to reawaken the Middle Ages. Specifically he took issue with the rood screen, which was
an essential element for nineteenth-century ecclesiologists in the symbolic arrangement
of a catholic church on medieval principles. Of its supposed historic significance Lingard
wrote:
I suspect that it was only after the monks had contrived for their own comfort choirs between the altar and
the people that roods were introduced, and those frightful figures of the crucifixion stuck up over the
entrance…that as the people were shut out from the sacrifice, they might at least have some object to
entertain their thoughts with while it was performed. 23
23
Lingard to Tate 30 May 1844, Typescripts of Letters of John Lingard to Rev. Robert Tate, f18.
208