Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/344

 PONSONBY

POTVIN

Dec. 1, 1867. Ed. Charterhouse and Cambridge (Trinity College). For some years he served in the 20th Hussars, and was then Captain in the Eoyal Dublin Fusiliers, taking part in the South African War (1900). He succeeded his father in 1912. Viscount Harberton has written a number of advanced books, notably his Idol of Four (1905), in which he treats Christian ideas with little respect. The first section is a defence of Judas Iscariot, and its characterization of Christ is Voltairean.

PONSONBY, Arthur Augustus William Harry, writer and politician. B. Feb. 16, 1871. Ed. Eton and Oxford (Balliol College). Son of General Sir Henry Ponsonby, he acted as a Page of Honour to Queen Victoria from 1882 to 1887, and was in the diplomatic service from 1894 to 1899 (Constantinople and Copenhagen). From 1900 to 1903 he was in the Foreign Office, from 1906 to 1908 private secretary to Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, and from 1908 to 1918 M.P. for the Stirling Burghs. His Conflict of Opinion (1919) is a dialogue on religion between a doctor and a parson, in which the parson arid his Church are routed. Mr. Ponsonby does not believe in any &quot; Director, Creator, Controller, King, Governor, Protector, or Father.&quot; He accepts only a God who is &quot; the spirit of perfection outside of us&quot; (p. 144), and thinks that &quot; we may conceivably in time succeed in creating God more definitely &quot; (p. 145).

POPE, Alexander, poet. B. May 21, 1688. Ed. private tutors (priests) and Twyford Catholic School. His father, a merchant, had embraced Catholicism in Portugal, and the boy, cut off from the public schools, had a desultory education. But he was precocious and a diligent student. He read Greek, Latin, French, and Italian in his early teens, and wrote poetry which attracted attention (Pastorals, 1709) before he was eighteen. By 1711, when he published the Essay onCriticism,he 615

was one of the most prominent men in the London literary set of the time. The Rape of the Lock was written in the following year. He gave a magnificent rendering in English of Homer s Iliad (6 vols., 1715-20). Pope settled at Twickenham, and was familiar with Lady Mary Montagu (until she quarrelled with him), Bolingbroke, and other Deists. It is now accepted that his famous Essay on Man, of which the first book appeared in 1733, was manufactured out of material supplied by Bolingbroke, of whom he was an enthusiastic pupil. Such couplets as

&quot; Know thou thyself, presume not God to scan ; The proper study of mankind is man,&quot;

are sufficiently clear belittlements of Christian theology. To it, in 1738, Pope added his &quot; Universal Prayer.&quot; It is purely Deistic. Dilke, in his Papers of a Critic, describes Pope as a Christian on the strength of certain statements in his letters. The best recent writer on Pope, &quot; George Paston,&quot; more justly accepts Lord Chesterfield s characterization (Lexers, iii, 1410), that he was &quot; a Deist believing in a future state &quot; (Mr. Pope : His Life and Times, 1909, p. 471). Pope is included in the Catholic Encyclopedia on the ground of one of the customary &quot; death-bed con version &quot; calumnies. The writer says that Pope &quot; willingly yielded &quot; to a friend s sug gestion that he should receive the ministra tion of the Church. What Pope really said was : &quot;I do not suppose that it is essential, but it will look right. I heartily thank you for putting me in mind of it&quot; (Paston, p. 696). On Catholic principles, of course, it would have been especially essential in the case of a man who, like Pope, had been out of the Church for decades. He had entirely deserted Catholi cism for Deism, and the death-bed cere mony was only for appearances. Pope was a very abstemious man in a very drunken age, and kindly and generous, but vain and quarrelsome. D. May 30, 1744.

POTYIN, Professor Charles, Belgian poet and journalist. B. Dec. 2, 1818. Ed. 616