Bolingbroke, Fragment 2: "I dare not use theological familiarity and talk of imitating God." Frag. 4: "I hold it to be worse than absurd to assert that man can imitate God." The Platonists taught that if we would know and imitate God we must withdraw the mind from the things of sense, and contemplate the spiritual and the perfect. Pope's object was to ridicule those who thought that the perfections of the Deity were to be the model for the imperfect efforts of man. The notion, he says, is not less preposterous than the Eastern absurdity of twisting in a circle to imitate the apparent revolution of the sun.
[1131] MS.:
So Eastern madmen in a circle run.
[1132] Plutarch tells us, in his Life of Numa, that the followers of Pythagoras were enjoined to turn themselves round during the performance of their religious worship; and that this circumrotation was intended to imitate the revolution of the world. Pliny, in his Natural History, xxviii. 5, mentions the same practice.—Wakefield.
Pope referred to the sacred dance of the Mahometan monks. "They turn on their left foot," says Thevenot, "like a wind-mill driven by a strong wind," and Lady Mary W. Montagu, who witnessed the ceremony, states that they whirled round with an amazing swiftness for above an hour without any of them showing the least appearance of giddiness, which, she adds, is not to be wondered at when it is considered they are all used to it from their infancy.
[1133] MS.:
Of moral fitness fix th' unerring rule.
[1134] MS.:
Angels themselves, I grant it, when they saw
One mighty man, etc.
[1135] MS.: