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Good morning. The desk on which Samuel Johnson wrote his Dictionary of the English Language is to be returned to his former London home. It’s great news – the recovery of such an evocative literary relic after some 260 years – except that the desk might actually be a fake. Johnson’s god-daughter claimed that it was his, but only at the point at which she came to sell it, and needed the cash. Visitors to Johnson’s house are therefore being invited to decide for themselves whether the humble desk made from ‘deal’ is in fact the real deal. Johnson hated puns, so probably wouldn’t enjoy that joke – though he would have been tickled, I think, by Robbie Coltrane’s blustering portrayal of him in the TV show Blackadder, when his prized dictionary is panned as, ‘the most pointless book since How to Learn French was translated into French’. Look up the word ‘relic’ in Johnson’s dictionary and you find: ‘That which is kept in memory of another, with a kind of religious veneration.’ Johnson’s desk is certainly a relic in that sense of being kept in memory: it’s a memento, a souvenir of the legendary lexicographer, who was also a distinguished poet, playwright, essayist, critic, biographer, and editor. Yet it doesn’t seem quite right to say that his old desk demands veneration. Its appeal is sentimental rather than metaphysical. For any relic, its authenticity matters. For a religious relic, however, that goes beyond just being convinced of its origin. Religious relics ask us to believe that material objects can hold spiritual significance. In Christianity, relics symbolize the incarnational character of the faith, the idea that God took material form as a human being, and that the entire created world might have a spiritual dimension. This is what inspires veneration. Literary relics remind us of great writers like Johnson, just as religious relics remind us of great religious figures, like saints, or Christ himself. But religious relics also challenge believers to recognize something more profound. They are visible, even tangible reminders that while it is important to focus on the spiritual aspects of life, the material world around us might also be charged with the love of God. As the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote, ‘These things, these things were here, and but the beholder / Wanting’.