Everywhere I hear voices complaining about charges being imposed on those who wish to visit our great cathedrals. Everywhere, I reply to them: ‘Stop moaning and pay up!’ In fact, you should give more than you are asked. Who else is going to provide the money to save these astounding, irreplaceable buildings for a future in which they may one day be full of worshippers again? Wouldn’t you spend more on a good meal or a good bottle of wine, or a trip to the cinema?

Yes, of course, there should be concessions and exemptions if you are a child or disabled or have no job or are living on a tiny pension. If you have an especial desire to pray in a very large church, then there should be a chapel, near the entrance, where you can do so without charge. But it’s dishonest to pretend piety for a free ticket. You shouldn’t do it. As the great ghost-story writer and lover of cathedrals, M.R. James, might have asked of such people: ‘Do you know what forces you may be toying with, when you lie to get into a church?’ Of course James’s cathedrals contained slobbering demons hiding in the tombs, and sinister carved cats that turn on you and bite you in the middle of the psalm, and strange laughter, high up in the triforium, at dusk. Having attended the cathedral choir school at Chichester, and spent many a late afternoon amid its pillars as the shadows thickened and the noise of the busy world faded away, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised by such things.

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