Relumed her ancient light, not kindled new,
If not God's image, yet his shadow drew:
as reverencing that truth which telleth us this discovery was reserved for the 'glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God.'"[766] Pope was careful to show in his poem that his meaning was the reverse of what Warburton pretends. He conceives that God's image was hidden from our view, and that man, not God, was our proper study:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
He did not believe that the religion of nature, in this particular, was under any disadvantage, for he said, Epist. iii. ver. 148, that "the state of nature was the reign of God," and to "relume the ancient light" was, to his apprehension, the perfection of theology. The third passage is Epist. iv. 341-344, where Pope says, that "hope lengthened on to faith pours the bliss that fills up all the mind." "But natural religion," says Warburton, "never lengthened hope on to faith, nor did any religion, but the christian, ever conceive that faith could fill the mind with happiness."[767] Pope was of a different opinion. Hope and faith, according to his creed, and that of many deists, were part of the religion of nature.[768] He could not think otherwise when he "was a deist believing in a future state," and he was so far from supposing that the christian's faith had any superiority over the deist's in filling the mind with bliss, that all who "fought for modes of faith" were, in his estimation, "graceless zealots."[769] The searching acumen of Warburton, who never had his equal in forcing false meanings from his text, could not discover another allusion to christianity. His interpretations, strained at best, are directly opposed to the context, and this failure to detect one word which could honestly support his construction, leaves no doubt that the Essay on Man was intended for a system of natural religion to the exclusion of revealed.
The poet and his "guide" agreed in repudiating christianity. They differed on the question of a future state, but Pope, while rejecting Bolingbroke's conclusion, adopted his premises. "The fourth epistle he is now intent upon," wrote Bolingbroke to Swift, Aug. 2, 1731. "It is a noble subject. He pleads the cause of God, I use Seneca's expression, against that famous charge which atheists in all ages have brought, the supposed unequal dispensations of Providence,—a charge which I cannot heartily forgive your divines for admitting. You admit it, indeed, for an extreme good purpose, and you build on this admission the necessity of a future state of rewards and punishments. But what if you should find that this future state will not account, in opposition to the atheist, for God's justice in the present state which you give up? Would it not have been better to defend God's justice in this world, against these daring men, by irrefragable reasons, and to have rested the proof of the other point on revelation? You will not understand by what I have said that Pope will go so deep into the argument, or carry it so far as I have hinted." To rest the proof of a future state on revelation, was in Bolingbroke's estimation to build upon a fable. To abandon the proof from reason was therefore with him to relinquish the doctrine. Pope, who had accepted the theory that the justice of God could not be judged by our ideas, embraced the second and superfluous paradox, that the dispensations of God in this world were never unequal. On either ground, said Bolingbroke, the justice of God did not require a future state. The poet had rejected the witness of revelation to the immortality of the soul, and, under the pretext of "pleading the cause of God against atheists," his "guide" had persuaded him to give up the popular proof from reason. He stopped short of the inference that reason did not countenance a future state, or, in Bolingbroke's phrase, "he did not go so deep into the argument." His "guide" laughed at his inconsequence, and "could not," says Warburton, "forbear making the poet, then alive and at his devotion, the frequent topic of his ridicule amongst their common acquaintance as a man who understood nothing of his own principles, nor saw to what they naturally tended."[770]
Bolingbroke was not entitled to ridicule Pope. The docile pupil was not more blind to the reach of the principles instilled into him than was the arrogant master who imposed them. He said the notion that a future world could be essential to vindicate this world was not only needless, but blasphemous. He was never weary of railing at the impiety of the doctrine, and he pretended that the divines who held it "renounced God as much as the rankest of the atheistical tribe."[771] He did not see that the alleged impiety was the identical principle he adopted for the foundation of his philosophy, when, admitting the evils on our globe, he contended that they were linked to a larger scheme which would explain and justify them. "The universe," he said, "is an immense aggregate of systems. Atheists and divines cannot, or will not conceive, that the seeming imperfection of the parts is necessary to the real perfection of the whole."[772] He wronged the divines. They could, and did "conceive that the fitness of the particular portions of a scheme must depend upon their relation to the entire plan," and it was precisely because they argued that the justice of God in this world would be incomprehensible unless we extended our view to the world to come, that Bolingbroke charged them with accusing the Deity of injustice, and ranked them with atheists. The incapacity to understand his own principles could not be carried further.
Pope did not intend to proclaim openly to the world the deism he disclosed to his sceptical companions. "I know," wrote Bolingbroke, "your precaution enough to know that you will screen yourself against any direct charge of heterodoxy."[773] His plan was to put forth a scheme of natural religion without repudiating christianity in terms, that he might be able to give his poem any interpretation he pleased. He soon manifested his double design. Before he avowed himself the author of the Essay on Man, he was anxious that Caryll should be convinced of its orthodoxy. "Out of complaisance" to Bolingbroke, he had left undecided the question of the immortality of the soul:
If to be perfect in a certain state,
What matter, here or there, or soon or late?
He feared that this dubious language would be distasteful to Caryll, and thus wrote to him on March 8, 1733. "The town is now very full of a new poem, entitled an Essay on Man. It has merit, in my opinion, but not so much as they give it. At least, it is incorrect, and has some inaccuracies in the expressions,—one or two of an unhappy kind, for they may cause the author's sense to be turned, contrary to what I think his intention, a little unorthodoxically. Nothing is so plain, as that he quits his proper subject, this present world, to assert his belief of a future state, and, yet there is an if instead of a since that would overthrow his meaning."[774] Pope several times reprinted the poem with corrections, but never altered the word which misrepresented his creed on the question whether death was annihilation or immortality. He had a public version, which he adopted "out of complaisance to Bolingbroke," overborne by his showy rhetoric and imperious dogmatism, and a private version for his pious friend, to whom he professed that his conditional language was an "inaccuracy of expression which overthrew his meaning."