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But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the power to reason in verse. His Religo Laici, 1682, was a poem in defense of the English Church.
And although he was not a great talker like Jonson, the young wits crowded around him, eager for the honor of a word or a pinch from the great man's snuff-box. Besides his plays and satires Dryden wrote a poem in support of the English Church called Religio Laici.
Such are the beauties and the faults which may be found in profusion throughout the later works of Dryden. A more just and complete estimate of his natural and acquired powers, of the merits of his style and of its blemishes, may be formed from the Hind and Panther, than from any of his other writings. As a didactic poem, it is far superior to the Religio Laici.
Universalitas. 4. Certitudo. 5. Necessitas, i. e. as he explains it, faciunt ad hominis conservationem. 6. Modus conformationis, i.e. Assensus nulla interposita mora. And at the latter end of his little treatise De Religione Laici, he says this of these innate principles: Adeo ut non uniuscujusvis religionis confinio arctentur quae ubique vigent veritates.
But, come now, nobody hears us confess, the system which prescribes drugs, drugs, drugs at every visit and in every case, and does not give a severe selection of esculents the first place, but only the second or third, must be rotten at the core. Don't you despise a layman's eye. All the professions want it." "Well, you are a writer; publish a book, call it Medicina laici, and send me a copy."
The opening lines of Religio Laici or of The Hind and the Panther will serve as a specimen of his argumentative or didactic verse and Absalom and Achitophel for his satire. Selections are given in Ward, II., 454-483; Bronson, III., 20-58; Manly, I., 203-209; Oxford Treasury, III., 99-110; Century, 266-285. For selections see Craik, III., 148-154; Manly, II., 146-163; Century, 276-285.
It was this that drove him from the Puritanism of his youth to the Anglican dogmatism of the "Religio Laici," and from thence to the tempered Catholicism of the "Hind and Panther." It was this which made him sing by turns the praises of Cromwell and the praises of the king whom Cromwell had hunted from one refuge to another. No man denounced the opponents of the Crown with more ruthless invective.
Already, in an unpublished work which he had made it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he had, though but roughly and imperfectly, as he considered, exhibited the relation of his master's doctrines to revealed religion, and it had now become time to supersede this unpublished compendium, the Religio Laici, as he had styled it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, that "Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover for himself."
I felt it to be a good one, but my turn, when I write at all, is perversely to travel out of the record, so that my letters are anything but answers. So you still want a motto? You must not take my ironical one, because your book, I take it, is too serious for it. Bickerstaff might have used it for his lucubrations. There is Religio Medici and Laici.
He never freed himself from the Puritan sense of religion, from the Puritan love for theological discussion and ecclesiastical controversy. Two of his greatest poems, the "Religio Laici," and the "Hind and Panther," are simply theological treatises in verse. Nor did the Commonwealth's man ever die in him.
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