Note 1456 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
How change can admit, or nature let fall any evil, however short and rare it may be, under the government of an all-wise, powerful, and benevolent Creator, is hardly to be understood. These six lines are perhaps the most exceptionable in the whole poem in point both of sentiment and expression.—Warton.
Pope's justification of the partial ill which is not a general good is, in substance, that Providence has not supreme dominion over his physical laws, that change and nature act independently of him, and vitiate his work. In place of ver. 113-16 the earlier editions have this couplet:
God sends not ill, 'tis nature lets it fall, Or chance escape, and man improves it all.
The notion that the disturbing operations of "chance" could explain the existence of evil was intrinsically absurd, and inconsistent with Ep. i., ver. 290, where Pope says that "all chance is direction." Chance is, in strictness, a nonentity, and merely signifies that the cause of an effect is unknown to us, or beyond our control. Neither supposition could apply to the Almighty. Warburton quotes a couplet from the MS., which could not be retained without a glaring contradiction, when Pope had discovered two other evil-doers besides man,—nature and chance:
Of every evil, since the world began The real source is not in God, but man.