m can only end in
disappointment and discontent:

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies.

We think that we can judge the ways of the Almighty, and correct the
errors of His work. We are as incapable of accounting for human
wickedness as for plague, tempest, and earthquake. In each case our
highest wisdom is an humble confession of ignorance; or, as he puts it,

In both, to reason right is to submit.

This vein of thought might, perhaps, have conducted him to the
scepticism of his master, Bolingbroke. He unluckily fills up the gaps of
his logical edifice with the untempered mortar of obsolete metaphysics,
long since become utterly uninteresting to all men. Admitting that he
cannot explain, he tries to manufacture sham explanations out of the
'scale of beings,' and other scholastic rubbish. But, in a sense, too,
the most reverent minds will agree most fully with Pope's avowal of the
limitation of human knowledge. He does not apply his scepticism or his
humility to stimulate to vain repining against the fetters with which
our minds are bound, or an angry denunciation, like that of Bolingbroke,
of the solutions in which other souls have found a sufficient refuge.
The perplexity in which he finds himself generates a spirit of
resignation and tolerance.

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.

That is the pith of his teaching. All optimism is apt to be a little
irritating to men whose sympathies with human suffering are unusually
strong; and the optimism of a man like Pope, vivacious rather than
profound in his thoughts and his sympathies, annoys us at times by his
calm complacency. We cannot thrust aside so easily the thought of the
heavy evils under which all creation groans. But we should wrong him by
a failure to recognise the real benevolence of his sentiment. Pope
indeed becomes too pantheistic for some tastes in the celebrated
fragment--the whole poem is a conglomerate of slightly connected
fragments--beginning,

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

But his real fault is that he is not consistently pantheistic. Pope was
attacked both for his pantheism and fatalism and for having borrowed
from Bolingbroke. It is curious enough that it was precisely these
doctrines which he did not borrow. Bolingbroke, like most feeble
reasoners, believed firmly in Free Will; and though a theist a