The Word Alone

Victor Hugo, the great French writer, is famously credited with the striking observation, “England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.” Whether considered as a literary judgment or as an observation upon English history, the words contain a remarkable truth. Shakespeare represents something of what England produced; the Bible represents something of what produced England.

No serious account of the history of England can overlook the influence of Holy Scripture. The Bible did not merely furnish Englishmen with religious expressions for Sunday worship. For centuries its language, doctrines, moral principles, and view of man under God entered deeply into the life of the nation. It influenced kings and commoners, Parliament and pulpit, school and household, literature and law. England certainly has never been a perfectly Christian nation. Its history contains injustice, cruelty, corruption, war, and grievous moral failure. Yet this does not alter the historical fact that biblical Christianity became one of the principal forces by which the English character and English institutions were formed.

The Bible Gave England Its Language

One of the most obvious examples is the English language itself. William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, first printed in 1526, exercised an extraordinary influence upon English speech. Tyndale desired that even the ordinary labourer might know the Scriptures. According to the well-known account, he declared that if God spared his life, he would cause “a boy that driveth the plough” to know more of the Scripture than an ignorant clergyman.

Tyndale paid for that conviction with his life. He was executed in 1536, but his work could not be extinguished. Much of his translation passed into later English Bibles and ultimately into the Authorised Version of 1611. For generations thereafter the King James Bible was heard in churches, read around family tables, memorised by children, quoted by statesmen, and employed by writers.

Expressions which have become woven into English speech have biblical origins: “the salt of the earth”, “the powers that be”, “a thorn in the flesh”, “the writing on the wall”, “the root of the matter”, “the spirit is willing”, and “the signs of the times”. Shakespeare enriched the English language magnificently. But while Shakespeare was read chiefly by those who possessed books or attended the theatre, Scripture eventually entered cottages, churches, schools, prisons, workshops, and homes throughout the kingdom. The Bible became the people’s book.

The Bible Helped Form England’s Conscience

The influence went considerably deeper than vocabulary. Scripture taught generations of Englishmen that there exists a moral law higher than the commands of earthly rulers. Kings possessed authority, but kings themselves stood beneath the authority of God.

The Bible declares in Romans 13:1, “For there is no power but of God.” Yet the same Scriptures record courageous resistance when earthly authority commands what God forbids. Acts 5:29 says, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” This combination, respect for lawful authority together with the conviction that authority itself remains accountable to God, became profoundly important in British political thought.

A king was not God. Parliament was not God. The State was not God. There remained a higher tribunal. This conviction helped nourish the English suspicion of absolute government and contributed, alongside many political, legal, and economic forces, to the development of constitutional liberty.

The Reformation Put Scripture Before the People

The English Reformation transformed the religious landscape of the nation. For centuries ordinary men and women had possessed little direct access to Scripture in their own tongue. The Reformation restored the principle that the Word of God must be heard and understood by the people. In 1538, royal injunctions required an English Bible to be provided in every parish church. The Great Bible followed in 1539. One can scarcely overestimate what this meant.

The blacksmith, farmer, merchant, servant, and housewife could encounter the Scriptures in English. People gathered around church Bibles to hear them read. Then came the Geneva Bible, particularly beloved among English Protestants and Puritans, followed eventually by the Authorised Version under James I. England increasingly became a Bible-reading country. And a Bible-reading population inevitably became a population concerned with literacy and education. If every man ought to hear and understand God’s Word, then reading was no longer merely the accomplishment of the scholar or gentleman. It possessed spiritual importance.

The Bible Shaped the English Home

For generations the family Bible occupied an honoured place within countless British households. The father reading Scripture to his household, family prayers morning or evening, children learning the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and passages of Scripture, these became familiar features of Protestant domestic life. The Bible taught the sanctity of marriage, the responsibilities of parents, obedience of children, honesty in labour, care for the poor, personal chastity, truthfulness, sobriety, thrift, and responsibility.

The household was regarded not merely as an economic arrangement but as a moral institution established by God. The influence of this biblical domestic culture continued even among people whose personal Christianity was weak. Society often retained Christian moral assumptions long after individuals had ceased seriously to consider where those assumptions originated.

The Bible Encouraged Education

Christianity has always possessed a powerful reason for teaching people to read: Christianity is a religion of a Book. The Protestant emphasis upon personal acquaintance with Scripture strengthened that impulse enormously.

Sunday schools provide a striking example. The movement associated particularly with Robert Raikes in the eighteenth century sought to teach poor children who often worked throughout the week. They received elementary instruction on Sundays, including reading, with Scripture occupying a central place.

By the nineteenth century Sunday schools had become an enormous movement. Millions of British children passed through them. They did considerably more than provide religious instruction. They contributed to the literacy and moral education of working-class Britain before universal state education had become established.

The Bible Inspired Social Reform

Biblical conviction also motivated some of Britain’s greatest reform movements. William Wilberforce is perhaps the most celebrated example. Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade cannot properly be separated from his evangelical Christian conversion. He came to regard his political position as a stewardship entrusted to him by God. After years of struggle, Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807. Slavery itself was abolished throughout most of the British Empire by legislation passed in 1833.

Wilberforce was not alone. The abolitionist movement contained many evangelical Christians whose opposition to slavery rested upon the conviction that human beings possessed dignity before their Creator. Scripture declares in Acts 17:26, “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

The same evangelical awakening produced extraordinary charitable activity. George Müller cared for thousands of orphaned children at Bristol while depending upon voluntary gifts and prayer. Lord Shaftesbury campaigned for factory reform, better treatment of children, improved conditions for chimney sweeps, and greater care for those suffering from mental illness. Elizabeth Fry laboured for prison reform. Thomas Barnardo established homes for destitute children. Their approaches differed, and Britain’s social reforms had many causes and contributors, but Christian conviction was unmistakably one of the great engines of nineteenth-century philanthropy.

The Bible Shaped the British Sense of Duty

One characteristic traditionally associated with British life is duty, doing what ought to be done whether or not it is convenient. That ideal has classical and cultural roots as well as Christian ones, but the biblical contribution was considerable. Scripture dignified ordinary labour, in Colossians 3:23 the Bible says, “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.”

Work therefore possessed moral significance. Honesty in business mattered. Keeping one’s word mattered. Providing for one’s family mattered. Serving one’s neighbour mattered. The familiar Victorian virtues of industry, thrift, self-restraint, perseverance, respectability, and duty were certainly sometimes distorted into mere outward morality. Nevertheless, many of them had been nourished by generations of Protestant biblical teaching.

The Bible Sustained England in National Crisis

The influence of Scripture became particularly visible during periods of national danger. During the Second World War, Britain repeatedly turned publicly to prayer. King George VI called the nation to days of prayer at critical moments in the conflict. Churches filled with people seeking divine help. The King’s Christmas broadcasts likewise employed explicitly Christian language. His famous broadcast of 1939 concluded with words from Minnie Louise Haskins about placing one’s hand “into the Hand of God”.

Such language resonated because Britain still possessed a considerable reservoir of biblical consciousness. Even those who seldom attended church understood the language of Providence, prayer, sacrifice, duty, judgment, mercy, and hope. The nation’s instinct in extremity was still, at least publicly and substantially, to look upward.

The Bible Influenced English Law and Justice

It would be an exaggeration to claim that English law simply came from the Bible. English common law developed from numerous sources, including Anglo-Saxon custom, Norman institutions, medieval jurisprudence, parliamentary legislation, Roman and canon law influences, and centuries of judicial precedent.

Nevertheless, biblical and Christian moral concepts profoundly influenced the civilisation within which that law developed. The inherent worth of human life, the importance of truthful testimony, the seriousness of oaths, responsibility for wrongdoing, protection of the weak, charity towards the poor, and the conviction that justice must transcend personal power all found powerful reinforcement in Scripture.

The ancient biblical command remained formidable, “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment” (Leviticus 19:15). Justice was ultimately understood not merely as an administrative convenience but as a moral obligation before God.

The Bible Produced Missionary England

The Bible that shaped England was eventually carried from England throughout the world. William Carey went to India. Hudson Taylor went to China. David Livingstone carried Christianity deep into Africa. Thousands of lesser-known British missionaries established churches, translated Scripture, founded schools, opened hospitals, and cared for the sick.

Their work was sometimes entangled with the complicated realities of empire, and missionary activity should not simply be identified with British imperial policy. Indeed, missionaries sometimes sharply criticised colonial abuses. Their primary conviction was much older and greater than the British Empire. Mark 16:15 says, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

Britain became one of the great centres of the nineteenth-century missionary movement because generations had been taught to regard the Bible as the Word of God and Christ’s command as something to be obeyed.

Shakespeare and the Bible

This brings us again to Victor Hugo’s comparison. Shakespeare undoubtedly stands among England’s greatest achievements. His works display the astonishing richness of the English language and a penetrating understanding of ambition, jealousy, love, betrayal, power, guilt, folly, and death. England gave Shakespeare to the world.

But Shakespeare himself wrote within a culture saturated with biblical ideas and expressions. The Bible operated at a more fundamental level. It told generations of Englishmen what man was, what sin was, what righteousness was, what marriage was, what authority was, what duty was, what death was, and what eternity was.

Shakespeare helped England understand human nature. The Bible taught England to understand human nature before God. There lies the force of Hugo’s distinction.

What Happens When the Bible Is Forgotten?

Modern Britain is profoundly different from the Britain of Tyndale, Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, or Spurgeon. Biblical literacy has declined greatly, church attendance has diminished, and many moral assumptions once regarded as self-evident are openly disputed.

It is possible for a civilisation to retain the fruits of an inheritance for some time after abandoning its roots. Yet inherited moral capital is not inexhaustible. Liberty without responsibility can become licence. Rights without duties become selfish demands. Law detached from transcendent morality can become whatever the strongest political majority determines it to be. Human dignity becomes difficult to ground when man is regarded merely as an accidental collection of atoms.

The Bible’s contribution to England therefore belongs not merely to antiquarian history. It raises a question for the present. Can England indefinitely retain the moral architecture erected under centuries of Christian influence whilst rejecting the foundation upon which much of that architecture was built?

The Book England Still Needs

Victor Hugo’s saying deserves to be remembered because it reverses the ordinary direction of national pride. Nations delight in speaking of what they have produced, their poets, soldiers, scientists, statesmen, inventions, institutions, and victories.

Hugo pointed instead to that which produced the nation. England produced Shakespeare. But Tyndale’s Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Authorised Version, the Scriptures preached from parish pulpits, read beside cottage fires, taught in Sunday schools, carried by missionaries, quoted in Parliament, opened before monarchs, and read beside the beds of the dying helped form England’s language, conscience, institutions, and character.

The greatness was never in England herself. The treasure was the Book placed in her hands. And if there was truth in the saying that the Bible made England, there is wisdom in remembering that the England fashioned under its influence cannot safely presume that she has outgrown the Book which helped to make her. As the Scripture itself declares in Proverbs 14:34, “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”