SOURCE: “Pope's Beliefs,” in A Preface to Pope, Longman Group Ltd., 1976, pp. 109-24.

In the following essay, Gordon explores the intellectual and ethical background of Pope's thought in An Essay on Man, highlighting the poem's expression of prevalent philosophical, religious, and political ideas in early eighteenth-century England.

Papist or Protestant, or both between, Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean, In Moderation placing all my Glory, While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory. 

Imitation of Horace, Satire II, i, 1733 (65-8)

The separation of Pope's beliefs into the philosophical, religious and political divisions propounded in this chapter is clearly an oversimplication of complex material. Philosophical ideas can never be set apart from religious and political views for the fundamental reason that any enquiry into the meaning of the universe must also be an enquiry into the existence of God and the behaviour of man. Pope's philosophical views...