;
That, more than heaven pursue.

What blessings thy free bounty gives
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives--
To enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to earth's contracted span
Thy goodness let me bound,
Or think thee Lord alone of man,
When thousand worlds are round.

Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
Or deal damnation round the land
On each I judge thy foe.

If I am right, thy grace impart
Still in the right to stay:
If I am wrong, oh, teach my heart
To find that better way.

...

These stanzas, I am well aware, do not quite conform to the modern taste
in hymns, nor are they likely to find favour with admirers of the
'Christian Year.' Another school would object to them on a very
different ground. The deism of Pope's day was not a stable form of
belief; but in the form in which it was held by the pure deists of the
Toland and Tindal school, or by the disguised deists who followed Locke
or Clarke, it was the highest creed then attainable; and Pope's prayer
is an adequate impression of its best sentiment.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The remark was perhaps taken from Sir Thomas Browne: 'Thus have we
no just quarrel with nature for leaving us naked; or to envy the horns,
hoofs, skins, and furs of other creatures; being provided with reason
that can supply them all.'--_Religio Medici_, Part I. sec. 18.

[3] This sentiment, by the way, was attacked by Darnley, in his edition
of Beaumont and Fletcher, as 'false and degrading to man, derogatory to
God.' As I have lately seen the remark quoted with approbation, it is
worth noticing the argument by which Darnley supports it. He says that
an honest able man is nobler than an honest man, and Aristides with the
genius of Homer nobler than Aristides with the dulness of a clown.
Undoubtedly! But surely a man might say that English poetry is the
noblest in the world, and yet admit that Shakespeare was a nobler poet
than Tom Moore. Because honesty is nobler than any other quality, it
does not follow that all honest men are on a par. This bit of cavilling
reminds one of De Quincey's elaborate argument against the lines:

Who would not laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?

De Quincey says that precisely the same phenomenon is supposed to make
you laugh in one line and weep in the other; and that therefore the
t