[1367] A belief, that is, in the unity of God was the original faith, and polytheism a later corruption.
[1368] Warburton says that the allusion is to the refraction of light in passing through the oblique sides of the glass prism.
[1369] It was before the fall that God pronounced that all was good. But our author never adverts to any lapsed condition of man.—Warton.
He adverts to it in this passage, where he contrasts primitive virtue with subsequent license.
[1370] This couplet follows in the MS.:
'Twas simple worship in the native grove,
Religion, morals, had no name but love.
[1371] The divine right of kings to their throne, and the unlawfulness of deposing them, however much they might oppress the people for whose benefit they were appointed to rule, was a doctrine first taught in the time of the Stuarts. "It was never heard of among mankind," says Locke writing in 1690, "till it was revealed to us by the divinity of this last age." In opposition to the slavish theory which would subject nations to despots, Pope says that when government was instituted allegiance was the voluntary homage of love.
[1372] Mr. Pope told us that of the number that had read these Epistles, he knew of no one that took the elegance, or even the true meaning of the word "enormous," except Lord Bolingbroke alone. I wonder at it. I am sure I never understood it otherwise than as "out of all rule," and I do not know how anybody could that had read Horace's "abnormis sapiens," and Milton's "enormous bliss." Mr. Pope added for that reason, against his rule of brevity, the two next lines to explain it, and accordingly I since saw them interlined in the original MS.—Richardson.
Milton's "enormous bliss" was bliss "wild, above rule or art." The persons who misunderstood the epithet in Pope's poem must have been those who read the MS.; for the explanatory couplet appeared in the first edition of the Epistle. He obviously meant by "enormous faith" that the faith was an enormity, and it is difficult to conjecture what other sense could be attached to his phrase.
[1373] The "cause" here signifies the purpose or motive manifested in the constitution of the world, and this purpose is "inverted" by the doctrine that "many are made for one." The one is made for the many,—the prince for the people.