Spenser provides in The Faerie Queene a number of Christian ideas so intricately interwoven with romantic and Classical imagery that the sharp dogmatic distinction between the truth of Christianity and the falsehood of heathenism is very difficult to find. Then again, when Spenser identifies the apocalyptic Great Whore and the Pauline Antichrist with the Roman Church, he is not indulging in irresponsible abuse, but trying to see the part of Christianity he is rejecting in the perspective of the archetypal vision provided by the Bible. At the same time his Redcross Knight goes through a process of monastic discipline, penance and purgation. . . . The ritual is a vision of truth which has become false only because it has sunk to the level of physical acts within the order of nature. Reforming the Church, therefore includes the emancipation of rite and ceremony into an imaginative vision in which their symbolic reality is purified of its natural element. This part of our task would be much easier if Blake had left us an extended comment on Spenser paralleling his essay on Chaucer.