Johnson has told Pope's motive for publishing the Essay anonymously, and the manœuvres he practised to secure commendation. He had previously, when speaking to Swift of the Essay, professed his usual indifference to praise. "I agree with you," he said, Dec. 1, 1731, "in my contempt of most popularity, fame, &c. Even as a writer I am cool in it, and whenever you see what I am now writing, you will be convinced I would please but a few, and, if I could, make mankind less admirers and greater reasoners." After the little plot had been played out, he still kept up the false pretence in a letter to Duncombe, Oct. 20, 1734. "Truly, I had not the least thought of stealing applause by suppressing my name to that Essay. I wanted only to hear truth, and was more afraid of my partial friends than enemies."[747] He lifted up the mask with Swift, and avowed that his object was to get his philosophy approved. "The design of concealing myself was good," he said, Sept. 15, 1734, "and had its full effect; I was thought a divine, a philosopher, and what not, and my doctrine had a sanction I could not have given to it." He knew that friend and foe were aware that philosophy and divinity were not his strength, and he wished to obtain a fictitious authority for his work. He said to Caryll, March 8, 1733, "It is attributed, I think with reason, to a divine," and the poet had probably circulated the report he affected to believe. "I perceive the divines have no objection to it," he wrote again on March 20, "though now it is agreed not to be written by one,—Dr. Croxall, Dr. Secker, and some others having solemnly denied it." The first reports decided the popular judgment. The orthodoxy of the poem was taken upon trust, and when Pope owned the work in 1734, no one cared to commence a fresh inquisition.
An infidel who hated divines and divinity with all his heart, had dictated the doctrines of the Essay on Man. "He mentioned then, and at several other times," says Spence, in his record of Pope's conversation during the years 1734-36, "how much, or rather how wholly he was obliged to Lord Bolingbroke for the thoughts and reasonings in his moral work; and once in particular said, that beside their frequent talking over that subject together, he had received, I think, seven or eight sheets from Lord Bolingbroke in relation to it (as I apprehended by way of letters), both to direct the plan in general, and to supply the matter for the particular epistles."[748] Pope frankly informed the world, in the Essay itself, that he echoed the lessons of Bolingbroke, who was his "guide and philosopher,"—the "master of the poet and the song." The prose sketch of the "master" was seen by Lord Bathurst at the time, and he testified to Warton and Blair from personal knowledge, that Pope versified the arguments set down for him by Bolingbroke.
Warburton reversed the parts. The "seven or eight sheets," which contained Bolingbroke's prose draught of the Essay on Man, have not been preserved in their original form, and he did not reduce his published philosophy to writing till after the poem was commenced. "If," said Warburton, in allusion to the latter circumstance, "you will take his lordship's word, or, indeed, attend to his argument, you will find that Pope was so far from putting his prose into verse that he has put Pope's verse into prose."[749] But when Bolingbroke mentioned that the Essay on Man was begun before his published disquisitions were committed to paper, he added that they were "nothing more than repetitions of conversations" with Pope.[750] This statement Warburton was dishonest enough to suppress, and deliberately turned a half truth into a falsehood. The ungarbled expressions of Bolingbroke confirm the assurances of Pope and Bathurst, that he was the principal author of the philosophy in the Essay on Man. Warburton could not keep to his misrepresentation. When it was convenient for his purpose he changed his story, and Pope became "a pupil who had to be reasoned out of Bolingbroke's hands,"—a dupe who adopted Bolingbroke's insidious doctrines without perceiving the infidelity, and who had to thank his deliverer that "the poem was put on the side of religion."[751]
Mrs. Mallet told General Grimouard that Pope, Bolingbroke, and their friends, who frequented her house, were "a society of pure deists."[752] Bolingbroke was more of an infidel than Pope, for though he admitted that a future state could not be disproved, he laboured passionately to discredit the arguments in its favour. Pope held to the immortality of the soul. "He was a deist," says Lord Chesterfield, "believing in a future state; this he has often owned himself to me."[753] He frequently avowed his deism to Lyttelton, and acquiesced in the deistical interpretations which the Richardsons put on the Essay on Man. Revelation he rejected entirely. Lord Chesterfield relates that he once saw a bible on his table, and adds, "As I knew his way of thinking upon that book, I asked him jocosely if he was going to write an answer to it?" The evidence that he had renounced Christianity comes to us from various independent sources, and some of the witnesses are above the suspicion of misunderstanding or misrepresenting him.
One of the articles of Bolingbroke's deistical creed is said by Warburton to have been concealed from Pope. "A few days before his death," says Warburton, in the statement he drew up for Ruffhead, "he would be carried to London to dine with Mr. Murray in Lincoln's Inn Fields, whom he loved with the fondness of a father. He was solicitous that Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Warburton should be of the party. Some time before Mr. Warburton being with Mr. Pope at Twickenham, Mr. Hooke came in, and told us he had supped the night before at Battersea with Lord Bolingbroke, when his lordship in conversation advanced the strangest notions concerning the moral attributes of the Deity, which amounted to an express denial of them. This account gave Mr. Pope much uneasiness, and he told Mr. Hooke with much peevish heat that he was sure he was mistaken. The other replied as warmly that he thought he had sense enough not to mistake a man who spoke plainly, and in a language he understood. Here the matter dropped. But Mr. Pope was not easy till he had seen Lord Bolingbroke, and told him what Mr. Hooke said of a late conversation. Lord Bolingbroke assured him that Mr. Hooke misunderstood him. This assurance Mr. Pope with great pleasure acquainted Mr. Warburton with the next time he saw him. But Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope were both so full of this matter that at this dinner at Mr. Murray's, the conversation, amongst other things, naturally turned on this subject, when, from a very suspicious remark of his lordship, Mr. Warburton took occasion to speak of the clearness of our notions concerning the moral attributes. This occasioned some debate, which ended in some warmth on his lordship's side. This anecdote is not improper to be told in vindication of Mr. Pope's religious sentiments, and the reflections on Mr. Warburton, as if he had not attacked his lordship's impiety till after his death."[754] Warburton had previously told the story in his View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, and there he related that Bolingbroke "denied God's moral attributes as they are commonly understood."[755] In the narrative he wrote for Ruffhead, Warburton reports Hooke to have said, that Bolingbroke's "notions concerning the moral attributes amounted to an express denial of them."[756] The first statement Bolingbroke would have allowed to be correct; the second he would have repudiated. The two versions are treated by Warburton as one, and his charge against Bolingbroke, and his "vindication of Mr. Pope's religious sentiments," are based upon this presumed identity of propositions which were quite distinct to Pope and Bolingbroke.
Bolingbroke's views on the moral attributes of the Deity were the result of his mania to get rid of the arguments for a future state. Virtue is frequently oppressed and suffering in this world, and vice prosperous; the wicked defraud, supplant, and persecute the upright; and in manifold ways the felicities of life are not proportioned to the behaviour of men. A righteous Deity, we may be sure, would not ordain a constitution of things in which the good should repeatedly fare worse than the bad, often in consequence of their persistence in goodness, and then perish unrewarded in the midst of their self-denial. The inference is plain that they will be finally compensated in a kingdom to come. The struggle between sin and rectitude in good men continues all their days, and when the battle has been fought out, and the victory won, they are removed from the world. It is incredible that a benevolent ruler should set us to maintain a painful conflict with evil, and when we are disciplined to holiness should consign us to annihilation. The hope that well-doing will not go unrewarded, the apprehension that wickedness will not go unpunished, are sentiments engrained in the heart of man, and we may be confident that the source of all truth would not direct us to govern our conduct by false anticipations. The supposition that there is no future life is therefore inconsistent with the moral attributes of God, and to avoid this deduction Bolingbroke took up the theory of one of the worst class of deists, and contended that the moral attributes of the Creator were not the same as in our ideas, and could not be judged by our notions. He said he "ascribed all conceivable perfections to God," and that he was as "far from denying his justice and goodness as his wisdom and power," but insisted that his justice and goodness differed from ours in kind as well as in degree.[757] Wherever this hypothesis was brought in, the epithets "just and good" either ceased to have any meaning for us, or they meant exactly the reverse of "just and good." The object of the theory was, indeed, to set up the maxim that conduct which would be thought immoral among men might be the morality of God. Bolingbroke's philosophic vision was limited to a single point at a time. He abounds in astounding contradictions from his inability to keep his most emphatic principles before his mind, and he might be answered, without a word of comment, by ranging in parallel columns the passages of his writings which are mutually destructive. His hypothesis on the moral attributes of the Deity shared the usual fate of his dogmas. He denounced the doctrine of predestination, and called it "blasphemous," "impious," "devilish," because it was "scandalously repugnant to our ideas of God's moral perfections," and supposed "a God such as no one could acknowledge."[758] The moment he had to deal with an opinion he disliked, he thought it impious to imagine that the morality of God was not in conformity with our ideas, and he loudly appealed to the immutability of those innate moral convictions which alike defy the corrupt morality of libertines who labour to justify evil, and the artificial morality of metaphysicians who strive to prop up fanciful systems.
Warburton might fairly argue, that the theory which maintained that the morality of the Deity was radically different in kind from the moral conceptions of men, "amounted to an express denial of God's moral attributes." He was not entitled to charge upon Bolingbroke an inference he had vehemently disclaimed in his writings, and which was so far from seeming necessary to all pious thinkers that some distinguished christian divines had held the obnoxious hypothesis. No two of them might have been of a mind in the application of a principle the limits of which they could none of them pretend to define, but they would all have concurred with Bolingbroke that to deny the moral attributes of God, and to assert that they were not the same as in our ideas, were distinct propositions. The false turn which Warburton gave to his story is clear from the sequel of his narrative. Pope brought him and Bolingbroke together. The philosopher and his pupil, full of Hooke's accusation, introduced the subject of their own accord. Bolingbroke advanced opinions on the moral attributes which Warburton combated, and the debate ended, as it began, in a total disagreement. The views which Bolingbroke volunteered could not, for shame, be those which he had just disclaimed to Pope, and they were notwithstanding quite unorthodox in the estimation of Warburton. The case is simple. Bolingbroke protested to Pope, what he had protested all along, that he did not deny the moral attributes of God, and he maintained against Warburton in Pope's presence, what he had all along avowed, that they were not the same as in our ideas.
There is more, and conclusive evidence, that Bolingbroke had not concealed his hypothesis from Pope. The incidents narrated by Warburton occurred a few days before the poet's death. The philosophical papers of Bolingbroke were "all communicated to him in scraps as they were occasionally written,"[759] and the whole must already have passed through his hands. In these disquisitions Bolingbroke enforced his view of the divine attributes with tedious diffuseness, incessant reiteration, and unmeasured warmth. No opinion is brought out into stronger relief. A glance at the manuscript must have revealed the hypothesis to Pope, and the Essay on Man proves that he had actually adopted it. All who believed that justice, goodness, and truth were immutable, thought that our primary duty was to contemplate them in the Deity, and endeavour to imitate his perfections. Pope followed Bolingbroke in rejecting the idea. Man, he said, could "just find a God" and nothing more; consequently man was to be the only study of man.[760] Master and pupil agreed that every perfection was to be ascribed to God, and that he was to be loved, worshipped, and obeyed. But the pupil, like the master, held that "God did not show his own nature in his laws, because though they proceed from the divine intelligence they are adapted to the human,"[761] and the last line of the Essay on Man, the emphatic summary of a leading article in Pope's creed, is that "all our knowledge is ourselves to know."
In a subsequent passage Warburton extended his assertion, and alleged that Bolingbroke concealed the whole purpose of his theology from Pope. "The poet," says Warburton, "directs his argument against atheists and libertines in support of religion; the philosopher against divines in support of naturalism. But his lordship thought fit to keep this a secret from his friend as well as from the public."[762] The poet and the philosopher were both deists. The philosopher, Warburton tells us, communicated his principles to associates "who gave him to understand how much they detested them."[763] The poet professed deism before Chesterfield, Lyttelton, the Richardsons and the Mallets. Yet Warburton would have us believe that Bolingbroke disclosed his infidelity to unsympathising friends, and kept it a secret from his chief philosophical intimate, who frankly avowed his own deism in the Bolingbroke circle. The statement, incredible in itself, is opposed to the positive testimony of Bolingbroke when he says that all his written opinions were only the record of his conversations with Pope, and is even contradicted by the unconscious testimony of Warburton. He tells us that when Pope took refuge under his shield the circumstance which most exasperated Bolingbroke was that "he saw a great number of lines appear which, out of complaisance, had been struck out of the MS., and which, at the commentator's request, being now restored to their places, no longer left the religious sentiments of the poet equivocal."[764] The restored lines which modified any "religious sentiment" were barely half a dozen, and were confined to the single tenet of a future state. When Pope allowed his belief in a future state to seem "equivocal, out of complaisance" to his "guide," the infidelity of Bolingbroke could not have been unknown to him.
Still the plea of Warburton remains, that Bolingbroke was for deism and Pope for Christianity. Bolingbroke, says Warburton, argued for natural religion in opposition to revealed; Pope for revealed religion as a necessary supplement to natural. Warburton refuted his own position in the attempt to establish it. He appealed to three passages in the Essay on Man. The first, which he calls the chief, is Epist. ii. ver. 149-160, where Pope terms "reason a weak queen," which obeys the ruling passion. "The poet," says Warburton, "leaves reason unrelieved. What is this but an intimation that we ought to seek for a cure in that religion, which only dares profess to give it?"[765] The poet, on the contrary, immediately proceeds to show how reason can "rectify" the ruling passion, and finally concludes, ver. 197, that "reason the bias turns to good from ill." He insists that there is not a virtue under heaven which "pride" or "shame," rectified by reason, will not produce, ver. 193, and he informs us, ver. 183, that they are the "surest virtues" known to man. The second passage is Epist. iii. ver. 287, where, "speaking," says Warburton, "of the great restorers of the religion of nature, the poet intimates that they could only draw God's shadow, not his image: