Essay on Man | Page 2

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. Thus the two works were, in fact, produced together, parts of one design.
Pope's Satires, which still deal with characters of men, followed immediately, some appearing in a folio in January, 1735. That part of the epistle to Arbuthnot forming the Prologue, which gives a character of Addison, as Atticus, had been sketched more than twelve years before, and earlier sketches of some smaller critics were introduced; but the beginning and the end, the parts in which Pope spoke of himself and of his father and mother, and his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, were written in 1733 and 1734. Then follows an imitation of the first Epistle of the Second Book of the Satires of Horace, concerning which Pope told a friend, "When I had a fever one winter in town that confined me to my room for five or six days, Lord Bolingbroke, who came to see me, happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table, and, turning it over, dropped on the first satire in the Second Book, which begins, 'Sunt, quibus in satira.' He observed how well that would suit my case if