Parenting & Family Quote by John Dryden

Dryden lands the punchline like a courtroom closing argument: the problem isnt ignorance, its training. "By education most have been misled" flips the flattering Enlightenment story of schooling as liberation into something closer to soft indoctrination. The couplet rhyme ("misled/bred") is doing ideological work, making belief sound less like discovery than like animal husbandry - an inherited reflex you dont remember learning.

The most cutting move is the relay Dryden sketches between nurse and priest. He isnt just attacking clerical authority; he is mapping a pipeline. The nursery is the first institution. Before doctrine is preached, it is soothed into you, wrapped in bedtime rhythms and fear-management. By the time the priest arrives, the mind is already primed to accept a comforting structure that explains pain, polices behavior, and rewards obedience. "Continues" is the key verb: religion here is not a sudden persuasion but a maintenance program.

Then comes the real sting: "the child imposes on the man". Dryden understands that belief systems persist because they recruit identity. What was once dependence becomes loyalty; what was once taught becomes self. The adult keeps reenacting the psychological contract of childhood - safety in exchange for surrender - and calls it conviction. In the context of late 17th-century England, with its violent swings of church and state and the residue of civil war, this reads as more than literary sneer: its a diagnosis of how entire societies can be shepherded by habits formed before they had language to resist.