THE SECOND book of The Faerie Queene, like the first, is in my view concerned less with portraying a particular character's success or failure in living up to an agreed moral standard, than with exploring the viability of the different standards themselves that offer themselves as a basis for moral self-interpretation. But the terms of reference have changed. Book One in a sense dictates that the problem its successor inherits should be that of temperance, by arriving at the conclusion that the moral ideal is a middle course, between the arrogant self-assertion that leads Redcross to the House of Pride and the despairing quietism from which (ironically) it is Contemplation's task to rouse him. The Legend of Holiness links those pernicious extremes with Catholic worldliness and Catholic unworldliness respectively, marking as moral a Protestant middle way whereby one shoulders the responsibility of the active life even while humbling one's personal sense of right and wrong before the tasks set out for one by God. Its touchstone for that humble active life is loyalty to a godly monarch. But such unqualified turning to divine and concomitantly to human authority leaves the actual content of the faithful subject's moral life all but unexplored. Indeed for Redcross the problem hardly exists, because in his case the task of acting morally in the world is straightforwardly represented by a single symbolic act, spelled out by a direct order from above.