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.
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