impiety of putting himself in the place of God, and judging of the fitness or unfitness, perfection or imperfection, justice or injustice of his dispensations, v. 109, &c. V. The absurdity of conceiting himself the final cause of the creation, or expecting that perfection in the moral world, which is not in the natural, v. 131, &c. vỉ. The unreasonableness of his complaints against Providence, while on the one hand he demands the Perfections of the Angels, and on the other the bodily qualifications of the Brutes; though, to possess any of the sensitive faculties in a higher degree, would render him miserable, v. 173, &c. VII. That throughout the whole visible world, an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed, which causes a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man. The gradations of sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that Reason alone countervails all the other faculties, v. 207. VIII. How much further this order and subordination of living creatures may extend, above and below us; were any part of which broken, not that part only, but the whole connected creation must be destroyed, v. 233. IX. The extravagance, madness, and pride of such a desire, X. The consequence of all, the absolute submission due to Providence, both as to our present and future state, v. 281, &c. to the end.

V. 250.

EPISTLE I.

WAKE, my ST. JOHN! leave all meaner things

To low ambition, and the pride of Kings.

Let us (since Life can little more supply

Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan1;

A Wild, where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot;
Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Together let us beat this ample field,
Try what the open, what the covert yield;
The latent tracts, the giddy heights, explore
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
Eye Nature's walks, shoot Folly as it flies 2,
And catch the Manners living as they rise;
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;
But vindicate the ways of God to Man 3.

I. Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can
we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man, what see we but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho' the God be known,
'Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He, who thro' vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,

1 This line originally read thus: 'A mighty maze of walks without a plan. The emendation was not superfluous, since, as Dr Johnson remarks, if there were no plan, it was in vain to describe or to trace the maze'.]

2 Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, part II.: 'and shoots their treasons as they fly.' Wakefield.

5

ΙΟ

15

20

3 Milton's phrase, judiciously altered, who says JUSTIFY the ways of God to Man. Milton was addressing himself to believers, ... Pope...to unbelievers...; he, therefore, more fitly employs the word vindicate, which conveys the idea of a confutation attended with punishment. Warburton.

[There is no question of punishment, only of a decisive and final confutation.]

Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What vary'd Being peoples ev'ry star,

May tell why Heav'n has made us as we are.
But of this frame the bearings, and the ties,
The strong connexions, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look'd thro'? or can a part contain the whole1?
Is the great chain, that draws all to agree,
And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?

II. Presumptuous Man! the reason wouldst thou find,
Why form'd so weak, so little, and so blind?
First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,
Why form'd no weaker, blinder, and no less?
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade?
Or ask of yonder argent fields above,
Why Jove's satellites are less than JOVE?

Of Systems possible, if 'tis confest
That Wisdom infinite must form the best,
Where all must full or not coherent be3,
And all that rises, rise in due degree;
Then, in the scale of reas'ning life, 'tis plain,
There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man:
And all the question (wrangle e'er so long)
Is only this, if God has plac'd him wrong?
Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call,
May, must be right, as relative to all.

In human works, tho' labour'd on with pain1,
A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;
In God's, one single can its end produce;
Yet serves to second too some other use.
So Man, who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal;
'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

When the proud steed shall know why Man restrains
His fiery course, or drives him o'er the plains:

When the dull Ox, why now he breaks the clod,

Is now a victim, and now Egypt's God":
Then shall Man's pride and dulness comprehend
His actions', passions', being's, use and end;
Why doing, suff'ring, check'd, impell'd; and why
This hour a slave, the next a deity.

Then say not Man's imperfect, Heav'n in fault;
Say rather, Man's as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur'd to his state and place;

[Warton quotes the Platonic, The part is created for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of the part.']

[Satellites is here a tetrasyllable, as in the original Latin.]

65

70

His time a moment, and a point his space.

If to be perfect in a certain sphere,

What matter, soon or late, or here or there?

The blest to day is as completely so,

75

As who began a thousand years ago.

III. Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of Fate,

All but the page prescrib'd, their present state:

From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:

Or who could suffer Being here below?

80

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,

Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall1,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that Hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never Is, but always To be blest 2:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul, proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the watry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,

85

90

95

100

105

No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold 3.
To Be, contents his natural desire,

His faithful dog shall bear him company.

IV. Go, wiser thou! and, in thy scale of sense,

115

Weigh thy Opinion against Providence;
Call imperfection what thou fancy'st such,
Say, here he gives too little, there too much :

1 After v. 88. in the MS.

'No great, no little; 'tis as much decreed That Virgil's Gnat should die as Cæsar bleed.' Warburton. [Vergil's gnat is the Culex, the hero of the poem formerly ascribed to Vergil.]

2 [Johnson's strange commentary on this passage has only a biographical value. See Boswell

ad ann. 1775.]

3 After v. 108. in the first Ed. 'But does he say the maker is not good, Till he's exalted to what state he wou'd: Himself alone high Heav'n's peculiar care, Alone made happy when he will, and where?' Warburton.

Destroy all Creatures for thy sport or gust,
Yet cry, If Man's unhappy, God's unjust;
If Man alone engross not Heav'n's high care,
Alone made perfect here, immortal there:
Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,
Re-judge his justice, be the GOD of GOD.
In Pride, in reas'ning Pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,

Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods.
Aspiring to be Gods, if Angels fell,

Aspiring to be Angels, Men rebel:

And who but wishes to invert the laws

120

125

Of ORDER, sins against th' Eternal Cause.

130

V. Ask for what end the heav'nly bodies shine,

Earth for whose use? Pride answers, "Tis for mine:

For me kind Nature wakes her genial Pow'r,

Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev'ry flow'r;
Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew
The juice nectareous, 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 foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies1."

135

140

But errs not Nature from this gracious end 2,
From burning suns when livid deaths descend,

When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep
Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep?
"No, ('tis reply'd) the first Almighty Cause
Acts not by partial, but by gen'ral laws;

145

Th' exceptions few; some change since all began:
And what created perfect?"-Why then Man?
If the great end be human Happiness,
Then Nature deviates; and can Man do less4?
As much that end a constant course requires
Of show'rs and sun-shine, as of Man's desires;

1 Warburton compares Ep. III. v. 27.

2 Bayle was the person who, by stating the difficulties concerning the Origin of Evil, in his Dictionary, 1695, with much acuteness and ability, revived the Manichean controversy that had been long dormant. He was soon answered by Le Clerc in his Parrhasiana, and by many articles in his Bibliothèques. But by no writer was Bayle so powerfully attacked, as by the excellent Archbishop King, in his Treatise De Origine Mali, 1702.... Lord Shaftesbury... in 1709, wrote the famous Dialogue, entitled The Moralists, as a direct confutation of the opinions of Bayle... In 1710, Leibnitz wrote his famous Theodicée... In 1720, Dr John Clarke published his Enquiry into the Cause and Origin of Evil, a work full of sound reasoning; but almost every argument on this most difficult of all subjects had been urged many years before any of the above-named treatises appeared, viz. 1678, by that truly great

150

scholar and divine, Cudworth, in that inestimable treasury of learning and philosophy, his Intellectual System of the Universe, to which so many authors have been indebted, without owning their obligations. Warton.

3 [Such doubts arose in the mind of Goethe, in his sixth year, at the very time when they were being agitated by Voltaire, on the occasion of the great earthquake at Lisbon. See Lewes' Life of Goethe, Bk. 1. chap. 3.]

4 Ver. 150. Then Nature deviates &c.] "While comets move in very eccentric orbs, in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbs concentric; some inconsiderable irregularities excepted, which may have risen from mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, 'till this system wants a reformation." Sir Isaac Newton's Optics, Quest. ult. Warburton.

As much eternal springs and cloudless skies,

As Men for ever temp'rate, calm, and wise.

If plagues or earthquakes break not Heav'n's design,
Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline?

155

Who knows but he, whose hand the lightning forms,
Who heaves old Ocean, and who wings the storms;
Pours fierce Ambition in a Cæsar's mind,

Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind 1?
From pride, from pride, our very reas'ning springs;
Account for moral, as for nat❜ral things:
Why charge we Heav'n in those, in these acquit?
In both, to reason right is to submit.

160

165

Better for Us, perhaps, it might appear,
Were there all harmony, all virtue here;
That never air or ocean felt the wind;
That never passion discompos'd the mind.
But ALL subsists by elemental strife2;
And Passions are the elements of Life.
The gen'ral ORDER, since the whole began,

170

Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man.

VI. What would this Man? Now upward will he soar,

And little less than Angel3, would be more;

Now looking downwards, just as griev'd appears

175

To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.
Made for his use all creatures if he call,
Say what their use, had he the pow'rs of all?
Nature to these, without profusion, kind,
The proper organs, proper pow'rs assign'd;
Each seeming want compensated of course,

180

Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force1;
All in exact proportion to the state;
Nothing to add, and nothing to abate.
Each beast, each insect, happy in its own:

185

Is Heav'n unkind to Man, and Man alone?

Shall he alone, whom rational we call,

Be pleas'd with nothing, if not bless'd with all?

The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find)