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In 1682 came out his Religio Laici, or a Layman's Faith; this piece is intended as a defence of revealed religion, and the excellency and authority of the scriptures, as the only rule of faith and manners, against Deists, Papists, and Presbyterians.
The best two examples of his power of arguing in verse are Religio Laici, written in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and The Hind and the Panther, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catholic church. Verse of this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to explain something.
"Then, Mr. Moss, to-morrow you and I go to Huntercombe: you shall show me this Bassett, and we will give him a pill." "Meantime," said Dr. Suaby, "I take a leaf out of your Medicina laici, and prescribe a hearty supper, a quart of ale, and a comfortable bed to Mr. Moss. James, see him well taken care of. Poor man!" said he, when Moss had retired.
Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might have been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung and pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write Religio Laici and the Hind and the Panther and yet be the same man, every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat, change his master, and yet never change his nature."
That he was "naturally inclined to scepticism in philosophy," he tells us of himself in the preface to the "Religio Laici"; but he was a sceptic with an imaginative side, and in such characters scepticism and superstition play into each other's hands.
Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal were levelled at the Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. Religio Laici celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in its character of via media between the opposite extravagances of Papacy and Presbyterianism. The Hind and the Panther found this perfection spotted.
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