Note 1476 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
MS.:
Then give him this, and that, and everything: Still the complaint subsists; he is no king. Outward rewards for inward worth are odd: Why then complain not that he is no god?
Ver. 162 in the text is inconsistent with ver. 161. Pope supposes the good to rise in their demands until they rebel against receiving external rewards for internal merits, and insist that man should be a god, and earth a heaven, which heaven is one of the externals they have just indignantly repudiated.