To say that Donne's religious world was, overwhelmingly, a Christian world may seem to be stating the obvious. But it is true not just in the simple, practical sense that the Christian religion was established by law, but also in the less obvious sense that it was hard for most people in the early modern period to think outside a Christian paradigm. In a letter to his friend Sir Henry Goodyer, Donne wrote simply that ''Religion is Christianity.'' By contemporary standards, this was a boldly inclusive definition of religion: one that embraced the whole of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike. Donne was at pains to stress that he had ''never fettered nor imprisoned the word Religion'' by confining it to any single Christian confession or ''immuring it in a Rome, or a Wittenberg, or a Geneva; they are all virtual beams of one Sun . . . connaturall pieces of one circle'' (Letters, p.29). Yet, by modern standards, it may strike us as a narrowly exclusive definition. For Donne, as for his contemporaries, Christianity held an absolute monopoly of religious truth; it was not merely part of religion, but the whole.