[1048] Alexander the Great. He made a pilgrimage to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, in Africa, and the priests styled him son of their god. Upon the faith of the oracle his flatterers believed, or affected to believe, that he was of divine descent.
[1049] The four lines, ver. 157-160, first appeared in the edition of 1743.
[1050] MS.:
From whence all physical or moral ill?
'Tis nature wand'ring from the eternal will.
Pope plainly avows that physical evil is the disobedience of inanimate nature to the Creator, as moral evil arose from the disobedience of man. The couplet, in an altered form, was transferred to Epist. iv. ver. 111, where the context confirms the interpretation which the present version appears to require.
[1051] See this subject extended in Epist. ii. from ver. 100 to ver. 122; ver. 165, etc.—Pope.
Pope is answering the objections to moral evil. The passions for which he has undertaken to account are vicious in kind or in degree—they are the passions which are contrary to "virtue," ver. 166,—the passions of Borgia, Catiline, Cæsar, and Alexander,—and these are not elements essential to human life.
[1052] Pope uses almost the very words of Bolingbroke: "To think worthily of God we must think that the natural order of things has been always the same; and that a being of infinite wisdom and knowledge, to whom the past and the future are like the present, and who wants no experience to inform him, can have no reason to alter what infinite wisdom and knowledge have once done."—Warton.
In saying that the "general order" had been "kept," Pope did not mean that there were no exceptions, for he held that there had been "some change" since the beginning of things, which was to reject the fanciful principle of Bolingbroke. Infinite wisdom cannot err, but change is not necessarily the reparation of error, and a progressive may be preferable to a stationary system.
[1053] This is Pope's summary of his weak defence of moral evil. Moral and physical irregularities, he says in effect, have always prevailed, and both are indispensable. He denies this in his third epistle, and asserts that universal innocence endured for several generations to the great advantage of man.