The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution.

Thirty years ago, while I was working on a writer at the time of the English Civil War, I turned for guidance to one of the standard aids, the Pelican guide to English literature (1956, 1962). Under 'Bible' the index to the relevant volume pointed only to three tiny and dismissive references, as a book seen from a great distance when discussing Milton, Donne or Bunyan. The longish introductory chapter on the history of that time (ignored in the index) did slightly better, suggesting that Bible-reading did affect some individuals or sects; but little more.

The fact that study of English life in the mid-seventeenth century now looks very different is in large part thanks to Christopher Hill. In a dozen rightly-admired books and scores of articles related to 'the English Revolution' he has brought the Bible centre-stage. In accessing that time, as the latest jargon puts it, 'The Old and New Testaments' are no longer files to be called up after 'economics' or 'politics' or 'astrology' or whatever. We now understand that the Bible, which by then had been in the vernacular for several generations, permeated every part of life: particularly the Geneva Bible in its various forms, as Professor Hill makes splendidly clear. Just as those Testaments came out of upheaval, so in English they turned the world upside-down - a biblical phrase (Acts xvii. 6). Professor Hill's huge range of reading in the pamphlet literature of the time and elsewhere makes the central position of the Bible unmistakeable. It is an indictment of English Christian historians that it has taken a Marxist to right that wrong. In fact some Christian historians are now busy denying the Bible any place at all even in the English Reformation: Eamon Duffy in his popular, and partisan, The stripping of the altars (1992), finds the Bible irrelevant to the Christian religion, and ignores it.

The English bible and the seventeenth-century revolution is a collection of essays of breathtaking erudition - the result of what he calls 'many years of desultory general reading in and around the subject': only in him could desultoriness produce such richness. Here are large sections on 'Fast sermons and politics, 1640-1660', or on the power of 'Metaphors and programmes' - he is particularly good on use of the symbols of high trees, mountains and gardens, and the ambivalences of 'wilderness'. The long central part of the book, seven essays under' International Catholicism and national politics', shows England pointing upwards - to the imminent millennial consummation - but also, more strikingly, downwards: to fear of retribution for the execution of the monarch, or for backsliding, or for the failure to do much for the Protestant cause in Europe, even for the failure of the revolution. As he remarks, '"That stupendous year" 1656 came and went.... But nothing in particular happened. Four years later Charles II was sitting on the throne, not King Jesus.'

Professor Hill has been here before, for example in his studies of Milton and Bunyan, authors of 'the two great epics of Biblical Puritanism in defeat'. There is in this book, for all the scholarly brilliance, the most attractive courtesy of manner (and wit), and the sense of triumph at the defeat of the absolute authority of the Bible after 1660, a detectable tone of depression. He feels that he should have had the Old Testament, and not the whole Bible, in the title. (In this he is, I think, wrong. My own reading suggests that more fodder for oppositional politics came from the New Testament than he allows.) Then he remarks, 'If one reads the Bible straight through, the remarkable tolerance of the gospels comes as a shock.' The surprise in that points to one of the two things most strikingly missing from this ...