John Dryden's reticence about religion is one of the most surprising and perplexing of the many ways in which he challenges readers and scholars. As a public poet, Dryden offered weighty statements of religious principle on several occasions, but the variety of voices that he used and his own literary and public persona, as ironic, witty, anti-clerical, and detached, often played against the gravity of his claims. And Dryden's very public path as an individual from scion of the Puritan gentry via sardonic Anglican apologist to Roman Catholic convert was mysterious. This, plainly, was no pilgrim's progress. Although his writings on religion frequently deploy images of travel and trouble, of walking, wandering, of being foot-sore and weary, lost or plodding on, there is little evidence to suggest that Dryden's own journey to the Church of Rome was protracted or difficult. Indeed religion was perhaps of only intermittent interest to Dryden, and then only on his own terms. Yet this is precisely what makes his writings on religion and his own piety so intriguing. To explore them in their historical context is to grapple with an exceptional case, with a writer, thinker, and individual who could see further than the confines of the bitter religious divisions of the seventeenth century and who could marshal imaginative and cultural resources that were beyond the grasp of many of his contemporaries.