Pope's private profession of his belief in a future state was his real conviction. He proceeded to belie his true opinions, by standing up for the christianity of the Essay on Man. "The author," he says, "uses the words 'God the soul of the world,' which, at the first glance, may be taken for heathenism, while his whole paragraph proves him quite christian in his system, from man up to seraphim." Caryll was not convinced, and on October 23 Pope wrote to reassure him. "I believe the author of the Essay on Man will end his poem in such a manner as will satisfy your scruple. I think it impossible for him, with any congruity to his confined and strictly philosophical subject, to mention our Saviour directly; but he may magnify the christian doctrine as the perfection of all moral; nay, and even, I fancy, quote the very words of the Gospel precept, that includes all the law and the precepts, Thou shalt love God above all things, &c., and I conclude that will remove all possible occasion of scandal." He wrote again to the same effect on January 1, 1734:—"To the best of my judgment the author shows himself a christian at last in the assertion, that all earthly happiness, as well as future felicity, depends upon the doctrine of the Gospel,—love of God and man,—and that the whole aim of our being is to attain happiness here and hereafter by the practice of universal charity to man, and entire resignation to God. More particular than this he could not be with any regard to the subject, or manner in which he treated it." From the next letter of the poet, on February 28, it would appear that the "scruple" of Caryll was removed, influenced, perhaps, by the discovery that the work was Pope's own production. "Your candid opinion," says Pope, "not only on the Essay on Man, but its author, pleases me truly. I think verily he is as honest, and as religious a man as myself, and one that will never forfeit justly your kind character of him. It is not directly owned, and I do assure you never was whilst you were kept in ignorance of it."[775] The explanations which satisfied Caryll should have increased his suspicions, for Pope's language was plainly evasive. He rested the whole of his christianity on the doctrines which were held by a large class of deists. He neither avowed his faith in Christ, nor declared his belief that the Gospels were a revelation from God. He had drawn upon Wollaston's admirable work, The Religion of Nature Delineated, and there he had seen how inevitably a christian, who presses the arguments for natural religion, must sometimes refer to the fuller evidence of Scripture, and adopt a tone which would make it impossible that he could be mistaken for a deist. With this model under his eyes, and with the professed desire "to show himself a christian," and "remove all possible occasion of scandal," the ingenuity of the poet was insufficient to devise a single phrase which the majority of English deists would not have subscribed. Even the bare term "christian," which he flourished before Caryll, did not appear in the poem. He kept the word for the ear of the simple country squire, and imposed upon him by the transparent artifice of privately calling the doctrines of deism christianity. The "address," which he told Spence he had "written to our Saviour," would not have contributed to vindicate his orthodoxy, as we may judge from his statement, that it was "imitated from Lucretius's compliment to Epicurus, and omitted by the advice of Berkeley."[776] The application to our Lord of the compliment to Epicurus must have been shocking to Berkeley, and could never have entered into the mind of any one who believed that Jesus Christ was "God manifest in the flesh."
A few persons, not in the secret of Pope's deism, had the discernment to share the first impressions of Caryll. The celebrated David Hartley is said, by his son, to have "regarded the Essay on Man as tending to insinuate that the Divine revelation of the christian religion was superfluous," and to substitute for it "the plagiarisms of modern ethics from christian doctrines." But readers in general were more attentive to the poetry than the philosophy, and did not detect the lurking heresies of the poem till Crousaz published his Examen de l'Essai de Mr. Pope in 1737, which he enforced by his more elaborate Commentaire in the following year. "Mr. Pope's name, and not his own, spread them," says Dr. Middleton, "into everybody's hands."[777] Hitherto the poet had not been far wrong in his calculation, that his deism would pass unsuspected, because not directly professed, and the tenets he taught explicitly he believed to be so unanswerable, that, in a suppressed passage of the fourth Epistle, he raised a shout of triumph over the "scattered fools who would fly trembling from the heels" of his Pegasus. The comments of Crousaz, often founded upon mistranslations and misconceptions, laid bare sufficient sophistries, inconsistencies, and irreligion, to open the eyes of the public. Pope's confidence immediately changed to fright. "He took terror," says Richardson, "about the clergy, and Warburton himself, at the general alarm of its fatalism and deistical tendency." The poet had a dread of incurring the obloquy of any class or profession. "I know," Bolingbroke wrote to him, "how desirous you are to keep fair with orders, whatever liberties you take with particular men,"[778] and he confessed that this motive "was what chiefly stopped his going on" with his ethical scheme. "I could not have said what I would have said without provoking every church on the face of the earth, and I did not care for living always in boiling water."[779] He had never intended at any time to risk an attack from the clergy, and when the danger came unexpectedly, it was he himself that "fled trembling from the heels" of threatening foes.
His special fear of Warburton was not without cause. Warburton was the friend of Pope's enemies, Concannen and Theobald, and held Pope cheap both as a man and a poet. Of the poet he wrote to Concannen, Jan. 2, 1727, that Pope "borrowed for want of genius."[780] Of the man he wrote to Hurd, Jan. 2, 1757, "Till his letters were published, I had as indifferent an opinion of his morals as the gentlemen of the Dunciad pretended to have. Mr. Pope knew this, and had the justice to own to me that I fairly followed appearances when I thought well of them, and ill of him."[781] The Essay on Man was especially obnoxious to Warburton. He said that it was collected "from the worst passages of the worst authors,"[782] and that the doctrines were "rank atheism."[783] He did not confine his denunciation of the poem to conversation, but refuted its vicious principles in some formal dissertations which he read at a literary club in Newark.[784] The Dunciad faction, we may be certain, were careful to circulate his asperities, and Pope assisted the malignity of the Dunces by keeping his ears open to all the ill they reported. Warburton had now shown his quality by his treatise on the Alliance between Church and State, and the first books of the Divine Legation. The poet, who was quailing under the assaults of Crousaz, might well be alarmed lest a more formidable enemy should speak to the world the criticisms he propagated in conversation, and in his addresses to the Newark Club. In theology and metaphysics he was far beyond Pope's "philosopher and guide." He was even more dictatorial and abusive, more over-bearing and contemptuous, more ingenious in his sophistries, and not more scrupulous in the use of his weapons. His moral obliquities, which have half-ruined his reputation with posterity, were of a kind to increase the apprehensions of Pope, who must have submitted in helpless silence to the sweeping, haughty, scornful exposure of the Essay on Man.
When the storm had begun to burst on the defenceless head of Pope, Warburton saw reason to go over to his side, and in December, 1738, commenced an anonymous reply to Crousaz in a monthly publication called the Works of the Learned. An equitable judgment was not among the merits of Warburton. His dogmatic violence could not brook the least concession to an opposing view, and he was always in extremes. While he herded with "the gentlemen of the Dunciad" he was uncompromising in his censure of Pope. He suddenly transferred his advocacy to the enemy, and indulged, with a daring defiance of consistency, in a wild exaggeration of Pope's powers, and a hardy denial of his errors and defects. The man who "borrowed for want of genius," became "the last of the poetic line amongst us, on whom, the large patrimony of his whole race is devolved."[785] He had not only inherited the entire gifts of all poets of all times, "he was the maker of a new species of the sublime, so new that we have yet no name for it, though of a nature distinct from every other known beauty of poetry." "The two great perfections in works of genius," Warburton goes on, "are wit and sublimity. Many writers have been witty; some have been sublime; and a few have even possessed both these qualities separately. But none, that I know of, besides our poet, hath had the art to incorporate them. This seems to be the last effort of the imagination to poetical perfection."[786] A single example of Pope's witty sublime is specified by Warburton,—the comparison of Newton to the ape. Unfortunately, this instance of the "new species of the sublime,"—"so new that we have yet no name for it,"—was copied from a Latin poet of the sixteenth century, and was a false conceit without a spark of sublimity or wit.
With the change in his view of Pope's genius, there was a complete revolution in Warburton's estimate of the Essay on Man. The work ceased to be made up "from the worst passages of the worst authors." A superlative originality took the place of ignorant plagiarism, and "he uttered heavy menaces," says Bishop Law, "against those who presumed to insinuate that Pope borrowed anything from any man whatsoever."[787] The "rank atheism," in like manner, was converted into the purest orthodoxy, and every line breathed forth piety and sound philosophy. "He follows truth," said his advocate, "uniformly throughout."[788] The strain of sickening adulation in which Warburton conveyed his newly-born admiration showed that arrogance was not more congenial to his nature than servility, and both were rivalled by the effrontery with which he spoke of those who shared his old opinions. He and the "gentlemen of the Dunciad" had agreed in thinking ill of Pope's morals, but the conviction was genuine with Warburton, and "pretence" in them.[789] He declaimed against the "rank atheism" of the Essay on Man, but the freethinkers who had believed that Pope was of "their party" had "affectedly embraced the delusion."[790]
Warburton's accusations of insincerity were the more unblushing that his recantation was partly feigned. When he published his defence of three epistles of the Essay on Man, he said that Pope's "strong and delicate reasoning ran equally through all" the poem, but that "the turn of the fourth epistle being more popular seemed to need no comment."[791] His real motive for passing over the fourth epistle was very different, and comes out in a letter to Dr. Birch, Oct. 25, 1739. "I have been looking over, inter nos, the fourth epistle of the Essay on Man; for I have a great inclination to make an analysis of that to complete the whole. I find this part of my defence of Mr. Pope as difficult as a confutation of Mr. Crousaz's nonsense, and a detection of the translator's blunders, are easy. I do not know whether I can do it to my mind, or whether I shall do it at all, so beg you would keep it secret."[792] He left the fourth epistle undefended because it was almost beyond his powers of sophistry to devise a defence, and professed to the world that "the strong and delicate reasoning was too popular to need a comment." Having undertaken the "difficult" task, he kept up the dissimulation, justified every doctrine the epistle contained, and lauded it, in common with the rest of the work, for its "exact reasoning," and for "a precision, force, and closeness of connection rarely to be met with, even in the most formal treatises of philosophy."[793] His want of sincerity would be self-evident without the contradiction between his confidential confessions, and his public praise. No one, with his knowledge of philosophical divinity, could possibly have magnified Pope in good faith for the qualities in which he was deplorably deficient.
Dodsley, the bookseller, was present at the first interview between Pope and Warburton, and was astonished at the compliments the poet paid to his commentator.[794] There was no occasion for astonishment. Pope's despiser had turned idolater, "the gentlemen of the Dunciad" had lost their ablest ally, the thrust of Crousaz had been parried, and the champion was the dreaded man who was expected to be a fatal foe. The sensitive novice in philosophy, who was incompetent to fight, and could not endure defeat, was relieved from future as well as present fears. He would not henceforward be answerable to theological and metaphysical assailants. Warburton had assumed the responsibility of the poem, and his irascible, pugnacious vanity was a pledge that he would defend his certificate of orthodoxy with his usual violence, disdain, and ability. The relief to the mind of the anxious poet was immense, and fully explains his headlong gratitude. He immediately renounced his deistical interpretation of the Essay, and adopted all the views of his thundering advocate. "I know I meant just what you explain," wrote the obsequious poet, April 11, 1739, "but I did not explain my own meaning as well as you." He was too eager to live under Warburton's protection to retain a particle of independence. No matter how incredible might be the interpretations which his commentator often fathered upon him, he hastened to accept every one of them without reserve. The public were not deluded, and a letter of Dr. Middleton to Warburton, Jan. 7, 1740, is a fair specimen, expressed in friendly terms, of the common opinion. "You have evinced the orthodoxy of Mr. Pope's principles, but, like the old commentators on his Homer, will be thought, perhaps, in some places to have provided a meaning for him that he himself never dreamed of. However, if you did not find him a philosopher, you will make him one, for he will be wise enough to take the benefit of your reading, and make his future essays more clear and consistent." Pope's moral laxity was not the only cause of the facility with which he changed his creed. The shallowness of his convictions had a share in the event. He had no real insight into theology, natural or revealed. He rejected christianity because his associates sneered at it, and because the age was irreligious. Ignorant of the right road, he was sometimes persuaded that all roads led to a common goal, or he adopted the road which was pointed out to him by his guides. The Essay on Man would never have been written unless Bolingbroke had dictated the subject, and supplied the materials, and Pope was subdued by his dogmatism rather than enlightened by his arguments. The speculations the poet versified had not proceeded from his own mind; he believed as he was prompted; and he had not any rooted convictions to sacrifice when a second dogmatist provided him with more convenient opinions.
Pope would have been glad "to dwell in ambiguities for ever." In accepting the advocacy of Warburton he was obliged to abandon his equivocal attitude, and disavow the deistical creed. "The infidels and libertines," Warburton wrote to Dr. Stukeley, January 1, 1740, "prided themselves in thinking Mr. Pope of their party. I thought it of use to religion to show so noble a genius was not; and I can have the pleasure of telling you (and have Mr. Pope's own authority for it), that he is not."[795] His chief difficulty must have been to cast off his allegiance to his "philosopher and guide, the master of the poet and the song." But his reputation was at stake, and he did not hesitate. His anxiety to disclaim all sympathy with the theology of the teacher who had furnished the arguments of his poem was shown by one of his habitual frauds. He published, in 1741, his correspondence with Swift, and in the printed letter of December, 1725, he says, "Lord B. is above trifling; when he writes of anything in this world, he is more than mortal: if ever he trifles it must be when he turns a divine." A copy of the letter is among the Oxford papers at Longleat, and there we find that the words he really used were, "Lord B. is above trifling; he is grown a great divine." Pope reversed the language of the original passage that he might seem to the world to have contemned the divinity of Bolingbroke long before the Essay on Man appeared. The fraud had the intended effect with Pope's friends. Lord Mansfield inferred from the fabricated version that "Pope not only condemned but despised the futility of Bolingbroke's reasoning against revelation;" and Warburton quoted the sentence for an evidence of Pope's opinion "that no subject but religion could have sunk his lordship so far below the class of reputable authors."[796] Bolingbroke, ignorant of the trick, remained upon cordial terms with Pope, and did not outwardly resent his defection. The discarded master had a double motive for his forbearance. No man was more vulnerable, and he would have feared to provoke the malignity of the satirist. He was anxious in his life-time to conceal his infidelity from the outer world, and he could not expose the inconsistencies of the poet without revealing his own unbelief. "I have been a martyr of faction in politics," he once wrote to Pope, "and have no vocation to be so in philosophy."[797] Inwardly he was deeply mortified that "the song" he had inspired should be wrested to a meaning he disowned, that his admiring scholar should bow down no longer to his sceptical sophistries, and that the idol who supplanted him should belong to that priestly order of which he never spoke without scorn. His suppressed indignation, inflamed by fresh offences, broke out after Pope was dead.
When the orthodox meaning imposed on the Essay had once been accepted by the poet, he was anxious to use the new interpretation to silence or conciliate his opponents abroad. He immediately got Warburton's reply to Crousaz translated into French,[798] and employed Ramsay, a Scotchman, who had been Fénelon's secretary, to write to Louis Racine, April 28, 1742, and assure him that he was mistaken when he said in his poem La Religion,