ROCHESTER'SSATYR AGAINST REASON AND MANKINDAND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS DEBATE

The Faith of Unbelief: Rochester's “Satyre,” Deism, and Religious Freethinking in Seventeenth-Century England

“…10 Most accounts of the poem's immediate context have noted that by the time the "Satyre" was written, the application of reason to religion had become the new Anglican doxa. 11 Stillingfleet's remarks thus bring us to yet another paradox relevant to the content of the poem's freethinking: the peculiar switching of sides that forms the history of "rational religion." As Manning explains, the typical unbeliever was seen to reject Christianity on the grounds that it lacked rational proofs.…”