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Perhaps the most powerful and most frequently recurring literary influence on the Western world has been that of the Old and New Testament.

Certainly one of the most important comments that can be made upon the spiritual and cultural life of any period of Western civilization during the past sixteen or seventeen centuries has to do with the way in which its leaders have read and interpreted the Bible.

This reading and the comments that it evoked constitute the influence.

A contrast of the scripture reading of, let us say, St. Augustine, John Bunyan, and Thomas Jefferson, all three of whom found in such study a real source of enlightenment, can tell us a great deal about these three men and the age that each represented and helped bring to conscious expression.

In much the same way, we recognize the importance of Shakespeare's familarity with Plutarch and Montaigne, of Shelley's study of Plato's dialogues, and of Coleridge's enthusiastic plundering of the writings of many philosophers and theologians from Plato to Schelling and William Godwin, through which so many abstract ideas were brought to the attention of English men of letters.