Christmas Critics.

As a teenager on our annual holiday to the family house in Ireland, I used to take a slightly ghoulish pleasure in rereading my grandmother's musty copy of R. H. Benson's classic Reformation novel, Come Rack! Come Rope!, a fictionalized version of the adventurous, often horrific experiences of the underground priests who attempted to bring the banned Mass back to England in the sixteenth century. Now Alice Hogge has combined the true-life stories of these remarkable men into an even more gripping historical narrative, God's Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (HarperCollins, $27.95, 464 pp.). The surprise is that it has not been done before. This aspect of Tudor history is still little known, yet it is utterly engaging stuff, and on the scholarly level will add a persuasive new dimension to the revisionist history of the period recently popularized by Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars.

A mass of neglected material, confined until now to scholarly journals and books of Catholic hagiography, springs to life in this fast-moving account of the cat-and-mouse game that the disguised priests and their protectors played with England's Protestant authorities. There is the story of Robert Southwell, a gifted, idealistic young poet of good family who slipped ashore after Jesuit training in Rome to spearhead a literary revival by printing religious works on a fugitive press, but was eventually caught by his nemesis, the aging psychopath, Richard Topcliffe. There is the tale of Nicholas Owen, the carpenter who constructed hiding places known as "priest's holes" behind the floors, walls, and fireplaces of Catholic houses. They were so ingeniously constructed that some are still undiscovered; he died under torture without betraying any of them.

Among these "secret agents," John Gerard, SJ, was the James Bond: tall, dark, and charming, he moved undetected among the elite, deflecting hopeful matrons attracted by his gentlemanly skills at hawking and cards, and using Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises to make a swath of high-level conversions. Gerard's daring escape from the Tower is one of the many moments in the book that beg to be filmed. The most appealing character is Henry Garnet, leader of the Jesuit mission in England for more than fifteen years--a portly, retiring mathematician who understandably shrank from the job when he was first offered it. He demonstrated fortitude and good judgment throughout his harrowing years in England, but met a tragic end, drawn unwittingly into the seditious gunpowder plot of 1605. (On this year's holiday my twenty-one year old daughter, thoroughly bored with the Reformation after my own five-year obsession with the subject, picked up the book and read it almost in one sitting.)

Losing Moses on the Freeway (Free Press, $24, 224 pp.) by New York Times journalist Chris Hedges is in many ways a contemporary version of Robert Southwell's attempt to galvanize the language and practice of religion four hundred years ago. Like Southwell, Hedges regards the current spiritual state of his country with despair. We are in danger of forgetting the rules that make us human. For Hedges, these ancient rules are embodied in an imperiled, derided set of injunctions--the Ten Commandments. "Those who ignore the commandments diminish the possibility of love, the single force that keeps us connected, whole and saved from physical and psychological torment," writes Hedges.

This book is no Bible-bashing tract. Hedges explores ten episodes that feature the "deep and visceral" struggle of a particular individual with one of the commandments. Each of the chapters is a street-wise morality tale, peppered with chilling anecdotes and insights drawn from the author's experiences as a foreign correspondent. The prose is snappy, staccato, graphic; the insights penetrating and sophisticated. Hedges has the rare ability to give new life to cliched truths. It is not we who seek the commandments, he says--they find us, as soon as we violate the fundamental laws of human nature. The author's failure after college to make it as pastor among the urban poor leads him to recognize that "idols promise us power. God does not." He faces instead the "darkness" of the commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me."

Hedges's bleak snapshots of loneliness and death illustrate the emptiness of obsessive work, of compulsive leisure and mindless crowd mentality: the story of one leading churchman haunted by his past in Vietnam when "he was good at what he did" explodes the myth of the nobility of war, of the goodness of the nation and the individual. Behind each story lies a connecting, subversive theme: "Love is not benign. It is a threat to those in power, to movements that demand self-sacrifice, to those who wage war, to the very core of the civic religion every state seeks to build out of its prevailing religious tradition."

If there is one criticism I have of this life-changing book, it is its pessimistic tone. For Hedges, self-realization lies in selfless love for one's neighbor: this alone will satisfy our often unacknowledged hunger for God. But, given the entrenched secularism he so vividly describes, it is a tough struggle: the companionship of God's reciprocal love for us is barely mentioned.

Alice Hogge's Robert Southwell, like Hedges, is under no illusions as to the viciousness of a humanity without God: but Southwell's poem "The Burning Babe" is a reminder that the struggle against worldliness has a champion. One "hoary winter's night" Southwell sees a child addressing him from a fire burning mysteriously in the air. "My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns / Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns." The verses build up to a climax that recalls the event that transformed the often cheerless context of the Ten Commandments. "With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away / And straight I called unto my mind that it was Christmas day."

Clare Asquith is the author of Shadow-play: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (PublicAffairs).