No More Learning

In 1697, Pierre Bayle published at Rotterdam, his "Historical and
Critical Dictionary," in which the lives of men were associated with a
comment that suggested, from the ills of life, the absence of divine care
in the shaping of the world. Doubt was born of the corruption of
society; Nature and Man were said to be against faith in the rule of a
God, wise, just, and merciful. In 1710, after Bayle's death, Leibnitz, a
German philosopher then resident in Paris, wrote in French a book, with a
title formed from Greek words meaning Justice of God, Theodicee, in which
he met Bayle's argument by reasoning that what we cannot understand
confuses us, because we see only the parts of a great whole. Bayle, he
said, is now in Heaven, and from his place by the throne of God, he sees
the harmony of the great Universe, and doubts no more. We see only a
little part in which are many details that have purposes beyond our ken.
The argument of Leibnitz's Theodicee was widely used; and although Pope
said that he had never read the Theodicee, his "Essay on Man" has a like
argument. When any book has a wide influence upon opinion, its general
ideas pass into the minds of many people who have never read it. Many
now talk about evolution and natural selection, who have never read a
line of Darwin.

In the reign of George the Second, questionings did spread that went to
the roots of all religious faith, and many earnest minds were busying
themselves with problems of the state of Man, and of the evidence of God
in the life of man, and in the course of Nature. Out of this came,
nearly at the same time, two works wholly different in method and in
tone--so different, that at first sight it may seem absurd to speak of
them together. They were Pope's "Essay on Man," and Butler's "Analogy of
Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature. "

Butler's "Analogy" was published in 1736; of the "Essay on Man," the
first two Epistles appeared in 1732, the Third Epistle in 1733, the
Fourth in 1734, and the closing Universal Hymn in 1738. It may seem even
more absurd to name Pope's "Essay on Man" in the same breath with
Milton's "Paradise Lost;" but to the best of his knowledge and power, in
his smaller way, according to his nature and the questions of his time,
Pope was, like Milton, endeavouring "to justify the ways of God to Man. "
He even borrowed Milton's line for his own poem, only weakening the verb,
and said that he sought to "vindicate the ways of God to Man. " In
Milton's day the questioning all centred in the doctrine of the "Fall of
Man," and questions of God's Justice were associated with debate on fate,
fore-knowledge, and free will.
In Pope's day the question was not
theological, but went to the root of all faith in existence of a God, by
declaring that the state of Man and of the world about him met such faith
with an absolute denial. Pope's argument, good or bad, had nothing to do
with questions of theology. Like Butler's, it sought for grounds of
faith in the conditions on which doubt was rested. Milton sought to set
forth the story of the Fall in such way as to show that God was love.
Pope dealt with the question of God in Nature, and the world of Man.

Pope's argument was attacked with violence my M. de Crousaz, Professor of
Philosophy and Mathematics in the University of Lausanne, and defended by
Warburton, then chaplain to the Prince of Wales, in six letters published
in 1739, and a seventh in 1740, for which Pope (who died in 1744) was
deeply grateful. His offence in the eyes of de Crousaz was that he had
left out of account all doctrines of orthodox theology. But if he had
been orthodox of the orthodox, his argument obviously could have been
directed only to the form of doubt it sought to overcome. And when his
closing hymn was condemned as the freethinker's hymn, its censurers
surely forgot that their arguments against it would equally apply to the
Lord's Prayer, of which it is, in some degree, a paraphrase.

The first design of the Essay on Man arranged it into four books, each
consisting of a distinct group of Epistles. The First Book, in four
Epistles, was to treat of man in the abstract, and of his relation to the
Universe. That is the whole work as we have it now. The Second Book was
to treat of Man Intellectual; the Third Book, of Man Social, including
ties to Church and State; the Fourth Book, of Man Moral, was to
illustrate abstract truth by sketches of character. This part of the
design is represented by the Moral Essays, of which four were written, to
which was added, as a fifth, the Epistle to Addison which had been
written much earlier, in 1715, and first published in 1720. The four
Moral essays are two pairs.