Religio Laici, Or A Layman's Faith (1682) is a poem written in heroic couplets by John Dryden. It was written in response to the publication of an English translation of the Histoire critique due vieux testament by the French cleric Father Richard Simon. Simon's book applied detailed criticism to the textual history of the Bible and argued that, given the compromised nature of much of the Bible, Christians would do better to base their faith on the history and traditions of the Roman Catholic Church.
The tendency of Simon's book was to undermine Protestantism, which prioritises the authority of the Bible over the traditions and rituals of the Catholic Church, and so Dryden set out in Religio Laici to address the issues raised by Simon's book, along with other religious issues of his times such as Deism, in order to assert the validity of the teachings of the Church of England.
