Ver. 113. Go, wiser thou! &c.] He proceeds with these accusers of Providence, from ver. 112 to 122, and shows them, that complaints against the established order of things begin in the highest absurdity, from misapplied reason and power; and end in the highest impiety, in an attempt to degrade the God of heaven, and to assume his place:
Alone made perfect here, immortal there:
That is, be made God, who only is perfect, and hath immortality: to which sense the lines immediately following confine us:
Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,
Re-judge his justice, be the God of God.
Ver. 123. In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies; &c.] From these men, the poet now turns to his friend; and, from ver. 122 to 130, remarks, that the ground of all this extravagance is pride; which, more or less, infects the whole reasoning tribe; shows the ill effects of it, in the case of the fallen angels; and observes, that even wishing to invert the laws of order, is a lower species of their crime. He then brings an instance of one of the effects of pride, which is the folly of thinking everything made solely for the use of man, without the least regard to any other of the creatures of God.
Ask for what end the heav'nly bodies shine, &c.
The ridicule of imagining the greater portions of the material system to be solely for the use of man, true philosophy has sufficiently exposed: and common sense, as the poet observes, instructs us to conclude, that our fellow-creatures, placed by Providence as the joint inhabitants of this globe, are designed to be joint sharers with us of its blessings:
Has God, thou fool! worked solely for thy good,
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?
Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn,
For him as kindly spreads the flow'ry lawn.
Ver. 141. But errs not nature from this gracious end,] The author comes next to the confirmation of his thesis, That partial moral evil is universal good; but introduceth it with an allowed instance in the natural world, to abate our wonder at the phenomenon of moral evil; which he forms into an argument on a concession of his adversaries. If we ask you, says he, from ver. 140 to 150, whether nature doth not err from the gracious purpose of its Creator, when plagues, earthquakes, and tempests unpeople whole regions at a time; you readily answer, No: for that God acts by general, and not by particular laws; and that the course of matter and motion must be necessarily subject to some irregularities, because nothing is created perfect. I then ask, why you should expect this perfection in man? If you own that the great end of God (notwithstanding all this deviation) be general happiness, then it is nature and not God that deviates; do you expect greater constancy in man?
Then nature deviates; and can man do less?