1. See Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of Joh, Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Thought (1934; rpt., Ann Arbor, 1956).

2. See Thomas H. Fujimara, "Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem," PMLA 76 (1961): 205-17; Elias J. Chiasson, "Dryden's Apparent Scepticism in Religio Laici," Harvard Theological Review 54 (1961): 207-21; and Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden's Thought (Chicago, 1968), chapters 3-6.

3. The last two of these designations represent two possible ways of characterizing the position of William Empson. See William Empson, "Dryden's Apparent Scepticism," Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 172-81, and "A Deist Tract by Dryden," Essays in Criticism 25 (1975): 74-100.

4. See G. Douglas Atkins, The Faith of Joh, Dryden (Lexington, Ky., 1980).

5. Harth, Contexts, chapters 3-6.

6. Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 64-65.

7. Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, 1984), 104.

8. The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1958), 2:322, 11. 447-50. Subsequent line citations will be given in the text. In this, and in all subsequent quotations from Religio Laici, the italics are Dryden's.

9. Harth, Contexts, 67.

10. Ibid.

11. I use "Deist" (capitalized) to refer to the interlocutor identified as "the Deist" in the poem.

12. Harth, Contexts, 87.

13. Empson, "A Deist Tract by Dryden."

14. Father [Richard] Simon, Critical History of the Old Testament, trans. Henry Dickinson (London, 1682), 1: Preface.

15. Ibid., 3:118.

16. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, book 5, chapter 22. I quote from The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 5 vols., ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1977-82), 2:102-3.

17. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laici," ed. and trans. Harold R. Hutcheson (New Haven, Conn., 1944), 99-101. In the Latin original, the truths are transcribed in the forum interius, which Hutcheson translates as "conscience." He justifies this translation on the ground that Herbert makes no explicit distinction between conscientia and forum interius. Elsewhere, in fact (p. 88), Herbert says that the common notions, or catholic truths, of deism "sunt enim in ipsa mente coelitus descriptae," and Hutche-son translates mente as “understanding." Although Herbert, unlike the eighteenth-century deists, held to an innatist concept of reason, he was not so precise as to require that it be engraved or imprinted in a specific organ or faculty of the mind. In seventeenth as "understanding." Although Herbert, unlike the eighteenth-century deists, held to an innatist concept of reason, he was not so -century usage, the Latin conscientia and the French and English "conscience" refer in general to internal mental events as well as carrying both the later sense of "conscience" as an internal moral censor and of "consciousness." I have taken the liberty of altering Hutcheson's translation from the generalized "conscience" to the vague "within us" in order to avoid confusion—not only because Hutcheson uses "conscience" in an archaic sense that would be unfamiliar to many modern readers but also because Bayle, as we will see in chapter 3, uses the term "conscience" in a special technical sense that he stipulates. For Herbert (as for Descartes), intuitive knowledge is not different from rational knowledge but is, rather, the core of philosophical rationalism. Herbert conceives of illumination through the natural light to be internal or innate, but he has no need to identify it consistently with a particular organ or faculty such as the heart or the intellect. I have attempted to render Hutcheson's vagueness regarding the locus of natural illumination by varying my own formulations.

18. Norman Sykes, Church and State: In England in tire Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1934), 346.

19. See Harth, Contexts, 107-8. Cf. Ernest Campbell Mossner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason: A Study in the History of Thought (New York, 1936), 27: "It was not uncommon for divines accepted as orthodox to treat Natural Religion in the body of a theological work and then to add, as it were, an appendix on Revealed Religion." For a prominent member of this genre, although one in which the defense of revealed religion is rather more than an appendix, see Richard Baxter, The Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1667).

20. Of course, Saint Paul's remarks (Romans 2:14-15) about the salvation of pagans were ipso facto orthodox, but as Norman Sykes observes, in From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660-1768 (Cambridge, 1959), 159, "whereas hitherto, 'since the time of Augustine (De Spiritu et Littera, c. 27) the orthodox interpretation had applied this verse (sic ) either to the Gentile converts or to the favoured few among the heathen who had extraordinary divine assistance,' it was now elevated into an universal principle." (Sykes, in turn, is quoting Mark Pattison, "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750," in Essays and Reviews [London, 1861], 273.)

21. Mossner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason, 27.

22. For a recent example of such an objection, directed not at Mossner but at more recent scholars, see Roger L. Emerson, "Latitudinarianism and the English Deists" in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, Del., 1987).

23. James Anderson Winn, in his recent biography of Dryden (John Dryden and His World [New Haven, Conn., 1987], 379), makes much of Dryden's discussion of the mystery of the Incarnation as evidence that the poet's expressions of Christian faith are sincere.

24. See David Berman, "Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying;' in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, ed. Lemay.

25. For a recent discussion of this phenomenon, see ibid. See also Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), esp. chapter 12.

26. John Toland, Tetradymus (London, 1720), 96.

27. From a purely theological perspective, it would be hard to make sense of Dryden's position. If salvation can be achieved without belief in the Incarnation and the Trinity, then it is hard to see why the deists should be excoriated for denying us access to these doctrines.

28. In moving from the moral to the political, from the New World to the Old, I have followed the sequence reflected in the structure of Dryden's poem. In so doing, I have undoubtedly reversed the chronological development of deistic ideas. See Hutcheson's comment in Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laici," 57: "Deism did not develop as a revolutionary philosophy; it was the outgrowth of an attempt to solve, at first within the limits of Christian orthodoxy, the problem of sectarian persecution."

29. Ibid., 127 (emphasis added).

30. Ibid., 119.

31. By the same token, Dryden's deployment of scriptural deism is not presented as evidence of his own personal essence—as evidence, for example, that he is an opportunist rather than a sincere believer.

32. Dryden, Poems, ed. Kinsley, l:310.

33. Ibid., 1:306.

34. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry, 121.

35. It may well be that the repressive ideological valence of Dryden's deistic toleration also follows that of the "moderate and tolerant" latitudinarians. See Richard Ashcraft, "Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History," in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-1700, ed. Richard Kroll et al. (Cambridge, 1992), 155: "Latitudinarianism is not a moderate middle ground between contending extremes; it is, rather, part of one of the extremes. It is the acceptable face of the persecution of religious dissent."

36. As already indicated, Dryden does argue, in the attack on deism in the first part of the poem (ll. 99-114), that we cannot have an adequate notion of penitence without the revealed doctrine of the Incarnation; but by the time he comes to discuss disputes between Christian confessions and to develop his scriptural deism, this argument seems to have been conveniently forgotten.