No More Learning

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. One pair is upon the Characters of Men and
on the Characters of Women, which would have formed the opening of the
subject of the Fourth Book of the Essay: the other pair shows character
expressed through a right or a wrong use of Riches: in fact, Money and
Morals. The four Epistles were published separately. The fourth (to the
Earl of Burlington) was first published in 1731, its title then being "Of
Taste;" the third (to Lord Bathurst) followed in 1732, the year of the
publication of the first two Epistles on the "Essay on Man. " In 1733,
the year of publication of the Third Epistle of the "Essay on Man," Pope
published his Moral Essay of the "Characters of Men. " In 1734 followed
the Fourth Epistle of the "Essay on Man;" and in 1735 the "Characters of
Women," addressed to Martha Blount, the woman whom Pope loved, though he
was withheld by a frail body from marriage.