The literal sense is hard to flesh and blood, But nonsense never can be understood.
Granting, however, the obscurity or mystery of the one doctrine, it is a hard choice to be obliged to adopt, in its room, that which asserts an acknowledged impossibility.
In the Second Part, another point of the controversy is agitated; the infallibility, namely, which is claimed by the Roman church. The author appears here to have hampered himself in the toils of his own argument in a former poem. He had asserted in the "Religio Laici," that the Scriptures contained all things necessary for salvation; while he yet admitted, that those, whose bent inclined them to the study of polemical divinity, were to be guided by the expositions of the fathers, and the earlier, especially the written, traditions of the Church. There is, as has been noticed in the remarks on "Religio Laici," a certain vacillation in our author's arguments concerning tradition, while yet a Protestant, which prepares us for his finally reposing his doubts in the bosom of that church, which pretends to be the sole depositary of the earlier doctrines of Christianity, and claims a right to ascertain all doubts in point of faith, by the same mode, and with the same unerring certainty, as the original church in the days of the apostles and fathers. These doubts, with which Dryden seems to have been deeply impressed while within the pale of the Church of England, he now objects to her as inconsistencies, and accuses her of having recourse to tradition, or discarding it, as suited the argument which, for the time, she had in agitation. It is unnecessary here to trace the various grounds on which reformed churches prove, that the chain of apostolical tradition has been broken and shivered; and that the church, claiming the proud title of Infallible, has repeatedly sanctioned heresy and error. Neither is it necessary to shew, how the Church of England stops short in her reception of traditions, adopting only those of the primitive church. Something on these points may be found in the notes. I may remark, that Dryden is of the Gallican or _low_ Church of Rome, if I may so speak, and rests the infallibility which he claims for her in the Pope and Council of the Church, and not in the Vicar of Christ alone. In point of literary interest, this Second Part is certainly beneath the other two. It furnishes, however, an excellent specimen of poetical ratiocination upon a most unpromising subject.