138 Original Position of the High Altar 
remains, that they are simply secw/ar in their character ; and though 
we admit that they may be emblems of religion in daily life, and 
teach us that “ whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we should 
do all to the glory of God,” we cannot for a moment forget how 
far higher is the teaching of the emblems in the choir, all of them 
more or less bearing on the eternal praises offered by the “ Angels and 
Archangels, and all the company of Heaven.” And against Mr. 
Beresford Hope’s ingenious and mystical interpretation we were 
willing to put the decided opinion of Mr. Parker, whose earnest 
words on this subject will not soon be forgotten by those who heard 
them, on the occasion of our visit to the Cathedral in August last. 
Now we freely admit that the altar has been re-placed where it 
stood when Leland saw it, on his visit to our Cathedral, c. 1540-42 ; 
that is, “in the middle of the easternmost bay ; that is to say, half 
a bay in front of the screen which parted off the Lady Chapel or 
ambulatory.” } And more than this, we will admit that it had 
stood there perhaps for two centuries previously. There are ex- 
pressions in the consuetudinary of Sarum which cannot be satis- 
factorily interpreted except on this supposition. Thus the Lenten 
veil is directed to be suspended at certain times “zz the presbytery 
between the choir and the altar” (in presbyterio inter chorum et 
altare), and the winch and pulley remaining in the pier marked ¢ in 
our ground-plan—in the portion of it, by the way, which is fourteenth 
century work—shew that the altar must certainly have then stood 
eastward of the line ¢c d. Still it is clear that the consuetudinary is 
later than the erection of the inverted arches between the piers a c and 
é d, and of the apparently contemporaneous masonry-work below, in 
which are inserted the doors which it speaks of as the north and 
south doors of the presbytery, marked e¢ fin the plan. Thus one 
direction is, that “the procession should go through the north door 
of the presbytery, and round the presbytery ” *—showing, not only 
that the doors existed at that date, whatever it may have been, but, 
1§ee Sir Gilbert Scott’s pamphlet on the ‘ Position of the High Altar” in 
Salisbury Cathedral, p. 3. 
2See the extracts given in Sir Gilbert Scott’s pamphlet, pp. 17, 18. 
