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Perpetual Virginity. At this point, the poem is expressing some very orthodox views,and making jokes around them but not criticizing them.In a more serious and more historically-conscious comment, the poem says that“Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded /That all the Apostles would havedone as they did” (1.83.663-4). This targets, as Fairchild notes, “The gap betweenChristian theory and Christian practice”, 190 between orthodoxy and heteropraxy.Further, the poet describes the burners as Christians, not exempting them from thatappellation for their failure, nor discriminating between the different factions whokilled one another. Catholics and Protestants alike are ‘Christians’.The targets of Don Juan’s satire are cant and hypocrisy: the verbal representation ofrighteousness, especially when coupled with an active contravention of suchstandards. In the process of this satire, both clergy and laity are targeted for their sins,but Christianity as a belief system is not.ReligionThe discrimination between heteropraxy and orthodoxy is a constant feature ofByron’s work. Don Juan repeatedly validates religious, and especially Christian,belief. Expressing a pluralistic valuation of religion, the rhetor of Don Juan says,“even the faintest relics of a shrine /Of any worship, wake some thoughts divine”(13.61.487-8). That any faith should have the same effect suggests an idealised orromanticised attachment to general ideas of the Divine, rather than strict adherence toa specific formulation, although one formulation might still be deemed more perfectthan others.At several points, an absence of criticism of religion is evident, such as in thereference to “The only truth that yet has been confessed /Within these latest thousandyears or later” (13.7.49-42). Much like the stanzas on ruin and religion in CHP CantoII, this carefully avoids criticism of the metrically-possible ‘last two thousand years’of Christianity. Notably, in the preface to Cantos VI to VIII, the poet deliberately190 Fairchild, p.424.115