In the opening sections of the second part of The Rehearsal Transpros'd, Marvell articulated his doubts about satire as an instrument of political or religious engagement. ‘For ‘tis better’, he wrote:

Nevertheless, Marvell proceeded to write the second part in only a slightly less mocking and savage tone than the first. And in fact his justification for doing so followed immediately upon this expression of anxiety and principle:

In this case, the excuse is supplied by the fact that Parker's superiors in the ecclesiastical hierarchy have failed to curb his excesses, and the necessity by Marvell's belief that these excesses of tone and doctrine threaten the peace of the church. If Marvell had been asked to defend correspondingly his verse satires directed against the ministers and military officials of the Restoration government in the mid 1660s, he would surely have claimed that their excesses and failures of public responsibility threatened the welfare and safety of the state.

Unsurprisingly, Marvell was only half convinced by his own rationale; for he added, as a commentary on the first part of The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ‘It hath been thus far the odiousest task that ever I undertook, and has look't to be all the while like the cruelty of a Living Dissection, which, however it may tend to publick instruction, and though I have pick'd out the most noxious Creature to be anatomiz'd, yet doth scarse excuse or recompense the offensiveness of the scent and fouling of my fingers’ (p. 185).