Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.
Such a divinity was Jupiter, and to worship an abominable phantom, conspicuous for "rage, revenge, and lust," was not to adore "Jehovah."
[1586] It ought to be "confinedst" or "didst confine," and afterwards "gavedst" or "didst give" in the second person.—Warton.
[1587] This may mean that the Deity was beneficent, or holy, or both, but whatever sense Pope attached to the word, he held with Bolingbroke that the attributes of the Divine Being were not the qualities which passed by the same name among us, and the present stanza is a re-assertion of the doctrine of the Essay on Man, Epist. ii. 1, that we must not "presume to scan God," or think to know more than the bare fact that he is "good."
[1588] First edition:
Left conscience free and will.
Here followed, if it is genuine, a suppressed stanza, which Mrs. Thrale repeated to Dr. Johnson, and which she said a clergyman of their acquaintance had discovered:
Can sins of moments claim the rod
Of everlasting fires?
And that offend great nature's God
Which nature's self inspires
Mrs. Thrale called the stanza "licentious," Johnson observed that it was borrowed from the Pastor Fido of Guarini, and Boswell pointed out that a "rod of fires" was an incongruous metaphor. "I warrant you, however," said Johnson, "Pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out." The folly of the lines is transparent. The "sins" with which "nature's self inspires" man, "conscience warns him not to do," ver. 14, and Pope assumes that God will never be "offended" if we disregard conscience, and yield to temptation.
[1589] This stanza was evidently directed against the ascetic acts which were rated high among virtues by the papists.