 George Frederick Bodley did not intend to include a choir screen in his earliest plans for All Saints Jesus Lane here in Cambridge. However, it became apparent through the course of the building's design that it was really appropriate to have one for liturgical and for theological reasons, as well as for aesthetic reasons. A grade one listed Gothic Revival Church, it is a riot of colour, ornament and medievalist modern Victorian design, aimed to make a bold experimental statement. And the choir screen here is a part of that statement. It's painted wood. It has a profound three dimensionality to it. It sits up on a couple of steps at the threshold between the nave and the chancel, separating the chancel and the sanctuary from the main body of the worshipping congregation. But it is not, as is the case with all rude screens and choir screens, a liturgical separation as such. It's more about holiness, the celebration of the sacred, inclusivity in the mystery of the Eucharist, and a sense of drawing forward from the west towards the east of the church, not only liturgically, but also in its theological symbolism, whether a congregation is present or not. Notably, Bodley was George Gilbert Scott's first major architectural pupil, studying with him in the 1840s. And this 1860s church is one of the first major statements as a profoundly cutting edge architect that George Frederick Bodley made independently after he completed his training. In all saints, he constituted an important architectural turn from high Victorian Gothic, which primarily relied on French and Italian and sometimes German models of medievalism, turning to a more British set of examples of Gothic. In part, Bodley was really keen on East Anglian medieval architecture, and that primarily is what's inspiring the screen behind us here. This screen is special for a number of theological reasons in its decoration and in its motifs. On the western facade facing out into the nave, we have a cross with a series of croquettes painted in beautiful glowing tones of blues and golds. On the extreme outer edges of that cross are four emblems, and those emblems represent the four evangelists, those who told the story of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. So this is very much about the relationship between the cross, the resurrection, and the story of Christ as told in the biblical gospel narratives. It connects to the relationship between text and image that we can see in the church as a whole. In the Isle, there are a series of inscriptions from the Book of Revelation, and those inscriptions are about what heaven is like. The saints, the angels, and following the Lamb wherever he goes. The relationship between heaven and earth, and the way in which they are made profoundly new at the end of the ages. Texts running along the top of the wall near the highly decorated exposed wooden beams of the ceiling is taken from the Sermon on the Mount. A series of blessings. Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor, and these run straight the way around this wall leading up to the choir screen itself. Crossing the threshold from the western side to the eastern side of the choir screen and making our way into the chancel, it's possible to see that the types of painted ornamentation on the surface of the walls as well as the ceiling above us, they shift in a really interesting way. The wall paintings shift from English inscriptions to Latin inscriptions from biblical sources. So just on this side where the choir would have sat, there is a short inscription from the Psalms, Cantate Domino, sing a new song to the Lord. One of the factors that makes for an interesting parallel with grand monumental metalwork screens like Scott and Skidmore's from the early 1860s, is the way in which across the different media of metalwork and wood, the sense of vegetation, roiling, wild, and organic, is tempered by the Gothic style framework of the screen itself. Here, there is a sense of the screen springing into life in the finest traditions of medieval wood carving. That starts to shift as we travel upwards towards the upper part of the screen in which that sense of three-dimensional vegetation recedes and is replaced by painting in tones of aquamarine and blue. That painted pattern, similar to the walls surrounding us here at All Saints, is based on vegetal motifs primarily based themselves on Italian early Renaissance textiles. These were absolutely inspirational for architects like Bodley and his design network. Within that pattern of aquamarine vegetation across the upper part of the choir screen, there are a series of scrolls and those scrolls repeat the same phrases three times. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. This is a very profoundly important prayer in the Christian tradition, particularly associated with the passion with Good Friday and with the Easter vigil. The idea here is that by venerating the wood of the cross or a representation of the wood of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, one enters into the drama, the mystery, the tragedy, and ultimately the hope of salvation bound up in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection through that moment of passage from the pain of Good Friday towards the profound excitement, joy, and thankfulness of the resurrection on Easter Sunday. The painted ceiling in the chancel just beyond the choir screen is fascinating because it repeats and reconfigures a series of images that are already apparent to the worshiper in the nave. Those are images of the four evangelists surrounding the cross. On the chancel ceiling, the configuration is to have the Lamb of God, that symbol of innocence, of sacrifice, and of Christ's resurrection in the center, with, at the four cardinal points surrounding it, those four images of the evangelists, the three animals, and the winged man. In the four corners of that grid that comprises the chancel ceiling just above our heads are wreaths within which is the symbol IHS, which appears at various points throughout this church, and appears in so many other examples of Victorian Gothic revival ornament for sacred spaces. The IHS motif is the symbol of Christ, both letters of Christ's name and also in Latin, Jesus hominem salvator. Christ is the one who saves. So it, of course, in the complex connecting the choir screen here at All Saints with the chancel ceiling, is an ideal monogram, an ideal image to use because it connects the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity as fully human and fully divine with the significance of the passion and the way in which the veneration of the cross takes place here through the choir screen and the interlaced network of ornamental imagery throughout the church, whether there is a congregation present engaging in that specific style of liturgy or not. This is an object like so many choir screens and reed screens that speaks in both text and image in a church that is empty as well as in a church that is full of worshipers, both Victorian and contemporary.