atural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature."

Butler's "Analogy" was published in 1736; of the "Essay on Man," the
first two Epistles appeared in 1732, the Third Epistle in 1733, the
Fourth in 1734, and the closing Universal Hymn in 1738. It may seem even
more absurd to name Pope's "Essay on Man" in the same breath with
Milton's "Paradise Lost;" but to the best of his knowledge and power, in
his smaller way, according to his nature and the questions of his time,
Pope was, like Milton, endeavouring "to justify the ways of God to Man."
He even borrowed Milton's line for his own poem, only weakening the verb,
and said that he sought to "vindicate the ways of God to Man." In
Milton's day the questioning all centred in the doctrine of the "Fall of
Man," and questions of God's Justice were associated with debate on fate,
fore-knowledge, and free will. In Pope's day the question was not
theological, but went to the root of all faith in existence of a God, by
declaring that the state of Man and of the world about him met such faith
with an absolute denial. Pope's argument, good or bad, had nothing to do
with questions of theology. Like Butler's, it sought for grounds of
faith in the conditions on which doubt was rested. Milton sought to set
forth the story of the Fall in such way as to show that God was love.
Pope dealt with the question of God in Nature, and the world of Man.

Pope's argument was attacked with violence my M. de Crousaz, Professor of
Philosophy and Mathematics in the University of Lausanne, and defended by
Warburton, then chaplain to the Prince of Wales, in six letters published
in 1739, and a seventh in 1740, for which Pope (who died in 1744) was
deeply grateful. His offence in the eyes of de Crousaz was that he had
left out of account all doctrines of orthodox theology. But if he had
been orthodox of the orthodox, his argument obviously could have been
directed only to the form of doubt it sought to overcome. And when his
closing hymn was condemned as the freethinker's hymn, its censurers
surely forgot that their arguments against it would equally apply to the
Lord's Prayer, of which it is, in some degree, a paraphrase.

The first design of the Essay on Man arranged it into four books, each
consisting of a distinct group of Epistles. The First Book, in four
Epistles, was to treat of man in the abstract, and of his relation to the
Universe. That is the whole work as we have it no