The school of infidelity represented by Bolingbroke, and, in at least his earlier writings, by Soame Jenyns, and which, in a modified form, attained to much popularity through Pope's famous "Essay," assigned to man a comparatively inconsiderable space in the system of the universe. It regarded him as but a single link in a chain of mutual dependency,—a chain which would be no longer an entire, but a broken one, were he to be struck out of it, but as thus more important from his position than from his nature or his powers. You will remember that one of the sections of Pope's first epistle to his "good St. John" is avowedly devoted to show what he terms the "absurdity of man's supposing himself the final cause of the creation;" and though this great master of condensed meaning and brilliant point is now less read than he was in the days of our grandfathers, you will all remember the elegant stanzas in which he states the usual claims of the species only to ridicule them. It is human pride personified that he represents as exclaiming,—
"For me kind Nature wakes her genial power,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower,
Annual for me the grape, the rose, renew
The juice nectarious and the balmy dew.
For me the mine a thousand treasures brings;
For me health gushes from a thousand springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies."
You will further remember how the poet, after thus reducing the claims and lowering the position of the species, set himself to show that man, viewed in relation to the place which he occupies, ought not to be regarded as an imperfect being. Man is, he said, as perfect as he ought to be. And, such being the case, the Author of all, looking, it would seem, very little after him, has just left him to take care of himself. A cold, unfeeling abstraction, like the gods of the old Epicurean, the Great First Cause of this school is a being
"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall;
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world."
Such, assuredly, was not that God of the New Testament whom the Saviour of mankind revealed to his disciples as caring for all his creatures of the dust, but as caring most for the highest of all. "Are not two sparrows," he said, "sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father. Fear ye not, therefore; ye are of more value than many sparrows."
It was the error of this ingenious but very unsolid school, that it regarded the mere order of the universe as itself an end or final cause. It reasoned respecting creation, as if it would be true philosophy to account for the origin and existence of some great city, such as the city of Washington in the United States, built, as we know, for purely political purposes, by showing that,—as it was remarkable for its order, for the rectilinear directness of its streets, and the rectangularity of its squares,—it must have been erected simply to be a perfect embodiment of regularity; and to urge further that, save in their character as component parts of a perfect whole, the House of Representatives and the mansion of the President were of no more intrinsic importance, or no more decidedly the end of the whole, than any low tavern or outhouse in the lesser streets or lanes. The destruction of either the outhouse or the House of Representatives would equally form a void in the general plan of the city, regarded as an admirably arranged whole. And it was thus with the grand scheme of creation; for,
"From nature's chain whatever link we strike,
Tenth or tenth thousand, breaks the chain alike."
Nor is it in other than due keeping with such a view of creation, that its great Author should be represented as a cold abstraction, without love or regard, and equally indifferent to the man and the sparrow, to the atom and the planet. Order has respect to but the relations of things or of beings,—not to the things or beings themselves; order is the figure which, as mere etched points or strokes, they compose,—the legend which, as signs or characters, they form; and who cares anything for the component strokes or dots irrespective of the print, or for the component letters or words apart from the writing? The "equal eye," in such a scheme, would of necessity be an indifferent one. Against this strange doctrine, though in some measure countenanced by the glosses of Warburton in his defence of Pope, the theologians protested,—none of them, however, more vigorously than Johnson, in his famous critique on the "Free Inquiry" of Soame Jenyns. Nor is it uninteresting to mark with what a purely instinctive feeling of the right some of the better poets, whose "lyre," according to Cowper, was their "heart," protested against it too. Poor Goldsmith, when sitting a homeless vagabond on the slopes of the Alps, could exclaim in a greatly truer tone than that of his polished predecessor,—