To startle reason, stagger frail belief;
and feebly proceeds to argue away the worst meaning of the creed of “the good old man” Athanasius. Finally, we have a fatherly appeal for peace and quietness among the sects:—
And after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our reason runs another way,
That private reason ’tis more just to curb
Than by disputes the public peace disturb;
For points obscure are of small use to learn,
But common quiet is mankind’s concern.
It must have been the general disbelief in Dryden’s sincerity on religious matters that caused the ascription to him of various freethinking treatises, for there is no decisive evidence that he was ever pronouncedly heterodox. His attitude to rationalism in the Religio Laici is indeed that of one who either could not see the scope of the problem or was determined not to indicate his recognition of it; and on the latter view the insincerity of both poem and preface would be exorbitant. By his nominal hostility to deism, however, Dryden did freethought a service of some importance. After his antagonism had been proclaimed, no one could plausibly associate freethinking with licentiousness, in which Dryden so far exceeded nearly every poet and dramatist of his age that the non-juror Jeremy Collier was free to single him out as the representative of theatrical lubricity. But in simple justice it must also be avowed that of all the opponents of deism in that day he is one of the least embittered, and that his amiable superficiality of argument must have tended to stimulate the claims of reason.
The late Dr. Verrall, a keen but unprejudiced critic, sums up as regards Dryden’s religious poetry in general that “What is clear is that he had a marked dislike of clergy of all sorts, as such”; that “the main points of Deism are noted in Religio Laici (46–61); and that “his creed was presumably some sort of Deism” (Lectures on Dryden, 1914, pp. 148–50). Further, “The State of Innocence is really deistic and not Christian in tone: in his play of Tyrannic Love, the religion of St. Catharine may be mere philosophy”; and though the poet in his preface to that play protests that his “outward conversation shall never be justly taxed with the note of atheism or profaneness,” the disclaimer “proves nothing as to his positive belief: Deism is not profane.” In Absalom and Achitophel, again, the “coarse satire on Transubstantiation (118 ff.) shows rather religious insensibility than hostile theology,” though “the poem shows his dislike of liberty and private judgment (49–50).” Of the Religio Laici the critic asks: “Now in all this, is there any religion at all?” The poem “might well be dismissed as mere politics but for its astounding commencement” (p. 155). The critic unexpectedly fails to note that the admired commencement is an insoluble confusion of metaphors.