The native wood seemed sacred now no more.
People no longer held sacred the natural temple in which, ver. 155, men and beasts formerly "hymned their God," but it was thought necessary to worship in costly buildings, and sacrifice animals on "marble altars."
[1380] Bolingbroke, Fragment 24: "God was appeased provided his altars reeked with gore." A sentence of the same Fragment furnished Pope with his view of heathen sacrifices: "The Supreme Being was represented so vindictive and cruel, that nothing less than acts of the utmost cruelty could appease his anger, and his priests were so many butchers of men and other animals."
[1381] The "flamen" was a priest attached exclusively to the service of some particular god.
[1382] MS.:
The glutton priest first tasted living food.
Bolingbroke, Fragment 24: "As if God was appeased whenever the priest was glutted with roast meat." Wakefield remarks that Pope followed Pythagoras in calling food "living," because it had once been alive. A meat diet is said, ver. 167, to have been the origin of wars, and here we are told that the "flamen first tasted living food" after war and tyranny had over-spread the earth, which is an inconsistency, unless Pope believed that his "glutton priests" were more abstemious than the rest of mankind till animals were sacrificed in the name of religion. The poet, in this Epistle, is loud in denouncing the practice of eating animal food, but he ate it without scruple himself.
[1383] Milton, Par. Lost, i. 392:
First Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parent's tears,
Though for the noise of drums and timbrels loud
Their children's cries unheard, that passed through fire
To his grim idol.
Many of Pope's writings are strewed with Miltonic phrases, though they need not be pointed out, and certainly do not detract from his general merit. Such interweavings of significant and forcible expressions have often a striking effect.—Bowles.