1. 普通人可以讀經: 在中世紀,天主教教庭控制了聖經的傳播, 只有修士可以讀聖經, 仲要用拉丁文讀. 文藝復興時期普通人可以自己讀經.
2. 民主開始發展:當聖經開始被翻譯成英文、德文時,統治階級開始緊張,為甚麼? 因為當只有天主教會可以讀經,他們便擁有了權力, 但當一般人都可以讀經, 你自己可以去了解神對你的生命有何旨意,教會便害怕失去權力. 在英國有一段時間, 翻譯聖經的人要秘密地工作，否則會被警察拘捕甚至處決。馬丁路德就係one man against the Church，堅持每個人都有權透過聖經信上帝。「惟獨聖經」，即天主教會不能阻擋人自己認識上帝。當人發現自己可以直接與上帝溝通，即普通人的地位不比皇帝和教會低，民主思想亦開始同步發展。
2.普通人成為文學、藝術的對像：If you study the painting or the poetry of this period, you see a shift in what is considered to be worth depicting. Where in earlier centuries painters had been creating pictures of the saints, or of the great heroes of Greek legend and history, now they begin to paint pictures of ordinary people. One thinks of artists like Jan Steen, or indeed Rembrandt, in the Protestant culture of Holland, who love realistic scenes of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. Why? Because they are working within a culture that has grasped that God is deeply interested in ordinary people, not just in the heroes and the saints. So too when you look at the English literature in this period you see writers emerging who reflect that kind of value for the life of the ordinary person. One thinks of poets like John Donne or George Herbert, writing about their experiences of love or of worship as they are for ordinary people.
4. 描寫普通人生活的小說因此開始出現:It is in this context that the novel arises. One might say that the novel begins to emerge in England with the work of the radical Protestant preacher John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim's Progress and The Life and Death of Mr Badman; and then more plainly with the journalist Daniel Defoe, also writing very clearly from a Protestant background, as we see in his masterpiece Robinson Crusoe. Earlier on, the great literature had written more about 'epic' concerns; but now there begins to develop a form of literature that deals with ordinary people, and their loves, their worries and their struggles towards God.
5. 文學的主題開始與個人選擇有關: For the same reason we must take into account the background of Protestantism as we think about Shakespeare's plays. We see Hamlet standing alone on the stage, struggling with crucial personal choice: ‘To be or not to be’. And it is not by accident that Shakespeare changes the Hamlet story to make him a student at Luther's university in Wittenberg; this, says Shakespeare, is man as we now know him to be since Luther, an individual whose choices about life are supremely important. Nor is it accidental that Shakespeare centres The Merchant of Venice on the apparently insoluble clash of justice and mercy that is also so basic to the Reformation's understanding of the Christian gospel. These were issues of compelling importance, and we must understand them to understand the art of the time.
6. 往後三四百文學的發展就是人如何看自己: This is to be expected. 'God' is the name we give to that which is of the most overwhelming importance in the universe. Obviously our relationship to that God will have implications and consequences for everything else we do. If we believe that the most important being in the universe is a God who we, as ordinary people, can and must know and follow, then our lives – and the works of art we create – will move in a particular direction as a result. If, for us, there is no such God at the centre, then there will be a different pattern or mosaic to our lives, and everything they contain, literature included. Thus it seems that we can look at the history of the past 300-400 years since the Reformation, and see a movement in the development of the novel form and of poetry that reflects – among many other things – what their authors thought about God
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