Essay on Man | Page 2

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. 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,