II. died, and his brother James ascended the throne. In
the following year Dryden went over to the Roman Catholic Church. No
act of his life has met with severer censure. Nor can there be any
doubt that the time he took to change his religion afforded ground for
distrusting the sincerity of his motives. A king was on the throne who
was straining every nerve to bring the Church of England once more
under the sway of the Church of Rome. Obviously the adoption of the
latter faith would recommend the poet to the favor of the bigoted
monarch, and tend to advance his personal interests. There is no
wonder, therefore, that he should at the time have been accused of
being actuated by the unworthiest of reasons, and that the charge
should continue to be repeated to our day. Yet a close study of
Dryden's life and writings indicates that the step he took was a
natural if not an inevitable outcome of the processes through which
his opinions had been passing. He had been early trained in the strict
tenets of the Puritan party. From these he had been carried over to
the loose beliefs and looser life that followed everywhere hard upon
the Restoration. By the sentiments then prevailing he was profoundly
affected. Nothing in the writings of the first half of his literary
life is more marked--not even his flings at matrimony--than the
scoffing way in which he usually spoke of the clergy. His tone towards
them is almost always contemptuous, where it is not positively
vituperative. His famous political satire began with this line--

"In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin;"--

and a little later in the course of the same poem he observed that--

"Fraud was used, the sacrificer's trade,"

the "sacrificer" here denoting the priest. This feeling toward the
clergy never in truth deserted him entirely. But no one who reads
carefully his 'Religio Laici,' a poem published in 1682, can fail to
perceive that even then he had not only drifted far away from the
faith of his childhood, but had begun to be tormented and perplexed by
the insoluble problems connected with the life and destiny of man, and
with his relations to his Creator. The subject was not likely to weigh
less heavily upon him in the years that followed. To Dryden, as to
many before and since, it may have seemed the easiest method of
deliverance from the difficulties in which he found himself involved,
to cast the burden of doubts which disquieted the mind and depressed
the