(ed. A. Hopton, n.d.), p. 33

The Civil War of the Seventeenth Century... has never been completed.

T.S. Eliot, Milton (1947)

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One of my long-held beliefs, which has been confirmed in the process of writing this book, is that we impoverish our understanding of the past if we break it down into small pieces called "constitutional history," "economic history," "literary history," "political history," and so on; And we are no less impoverished if we allow the statistical calculations of demographers to hide human lives behind unreliable records of births, marriages, and deaths.

I remember being amazed when I first read T.S. Eliot's statement about the art of the poet at a tender age. "The soul of the poet... constantly combines a variety of impressions. An ordinary person... falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the sounds of a typewriter, or with the smells of food being prepared; In the poet's soul, these experiences always form a new whole" [1969]. Without wishing to make too great a claim to history, and still less to distinguish historians from "ordinary people," I think that there is some truth in Sidney's statement: "The best of historians is the subject of the poet." In a letter to his brother Robert in 1580, Sidney described the poet's art in words that fit a historian. "A poet in the depiction of effects, movements, whispers of people can be recognized as truthful, and yet he who notices them well will find in them a taste of a poetic streak... for although they were not, it is sufficient that they could be" [1971].

There are analogies between the historian's interpretive task and Sidney's and Eliot's description of the poet's practice. The historian should not dwell on the surface of events; His interests should not be limited to state papers, parliamentary debates, acts and ordinances, decisions of judges and local authorities, and still less to the battles and love affairs of kings. He must "listen"—cautiously and critically—to ballads, plays, pamphlets, newspapers, tracts, "whispers of men," coded diaries and private correspondence of members of parliament, spiritual autobiographies—any source that can help him or her to get a sense of how people lived and how their perceptions differed from ours. He or she should try to understand why even the most democratic of the seventeenth-century reformers apparently never thought of allowing 50 percent of the population to participate in the political or professional life of the country—women. Yes, women, as it seems, did not ask for such things. The historian must listen to alchemists and astrologers no less than to the bishops to the demands of the London crowds; And he or she should try to understand the motivation of the rebels, whether they were labeled anti-Catholic rebels, or anti-fencers, or simply rioters demanding food. Much of the work had already been done, not least by literary historians and literary critics who had not yet been included in the mainstream of historical scholarship.

A good — imaginative — story is akin to retrospective poetry. It is about life as it is, as well as how we can restore it. In the seventeenth century, the Bible was the center of emotional and intellectual life. Tyndell's majestic prose, the Geneva and Permitted versions have transformed the way the English think, and the English language—not just the way of thinking about theology. Reading the Song of Songs led us to millenarianism as well as to the desert. The related symbols of the desert, garden, and enclosure were related to the rise of Congregational churches, as well as to agriculture. And all this together led beyond the Atlantic Ocean, where anti-Catholicism also captured us. Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob help us understand the theological debates about predestination and free will; but they also talk about the economic problems of the younger sons and clarify the political ideas of the Levellers and Diggers, the memory of which remains with us until the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, Millennium did not manage to come to earth; but revolutionary millenarianism tells us a lot about the need for social reform, and secularized millenarianism helped Britain become a world empire. The biblical concept of idolatry was used for political purposes against Charles I; in the end, the Bible itself was condemned as an idol. The Psalms raised questions about politics and literary genres, as well as theology. They led us to Milton, just as the garden leads us to Marvel and metaphysical poetry. The Bible connects Hackwill with Samuel Fisher and Spinoza, and the Battle of the Books with the Battle of the Book.

Men and women used biblical idioms and biblical stories to discuss religious, political, moral, and social issues that might be dangerous to touch directly. The concept of the chosen people helped to express the extreme nationalism of England, and also gave Gerard Winstanley and the diggers confidence that their communist colonies were implementing the truth of biblical prophecy; This eventually helped to establish sectarianism as a permanent feature of English society. The idea that God was abandoning His chosen Englishmen led some to emigrate to America, others to fight for a more righteous society at home, and a society to become more aware of international obligations.

If we want to understand the mentality in seventeenth-century England, we can follow Jack Fisher's recommendation to start with the Bible. The Bible in English has helped men and women to think about their society, to be critical of its institutions, and to question some of its values. It had an authority that no other book could achieve: kings and their opponents turned to the Bible in the great conflicts of the revolutionary decades. At least one commentator has pointed out that the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the regicide John Bradshaw, and the Whig Republican Algernon Sidney all quoted the same biblical texts in support of their very different political positions.

Those who founded Congregational churches were often younger brothers and sisters who knew what land hunger and social oppression were. Banian speaks of the temptation to sell his birthright in Christ, as Esau did; he recalled the Jewish jubilee with approval: "The land must not be sold forever; for my land, said God" (Lev. 25:23)[1975]. So the sale of land, to which Banian's ancestors had been led by poverty, affected his state of mind. The land issue was still unresolved when Spence's followers put forward the idea of a jubilee. The wrath of God, from which some nonconformists decided to flee, was expressed in the injustice of English society. The millennium, the rule of the saints, and the promised land were the names they gave to their hopes for a better society, whether in New England or in Old England. In addition to threats of retribution, the Bible gives hope: prophets for a return from exile, for the good coming of the Good News, for Revelation. The end of all three of Milton's last poems offered hope, after and through defeat, in matters greater than his personal life. Idolatry was a word that Milton and Toroujon used to refer to false values.

When we rightly assert that the English became the people of the Book, we must not think that theology or life after death was all they studied in this Book. In fact, the Old Testament says nothing about life after death (1976). They found lessons and comfort for life on earth as well as for the journey to heaven. Some Englishmen also found confirmation and justification for their worst vices - discrimination against women, patriarchy, racism, social hierarchy, national enmity. The pious have not monopolized biblical phraseology either. At the end of the 18th century, folk songs praised the biblical virtues of highway robbers[1977]. The Bible established cultural norms that survived religious faith.

In this book, I have said nothing about the Bible in Wales, although it has had a lasting influence on the cultural history of that country. The Epistles and Gospels were translated in 1551, the entire New Testament in 1567, and the entire Bible translated into Welsh in 1588. But it is beyond the scope of this book and is not in my power. Protestant English Bible was unique in many respects. But in the junta and the XIX centuries, it began to be exported. Professor Valentin Boss has convincingly argued that Milton's Paradise Lost was a bestseller in pre-revolutionary Russia before the Bible became available in the native language. He had a great influence as a substitute for the Bible [1978]. In China, the missionaries had with them the great Biblical allegory of Banian, translated into Chinese. And when the Taiping rebels roused millions of peasants in the mid-nineteenth century, coming closer to overthrowing the emperor than any other movement until 1948, the Bible and The Pilgrim's Paths were their leader's favorite books [1979].

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