Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/507

Rh P O P P P 487 dactic work, as in his Essay on Criticism, he put together on a sufficiently simple plan a series of happy sayings, separately elaborated, picking up the thoughts as he found them in miscellaneous reading and conversation, and try ing only to fit them with perfect expression. The want of logical coherence in his system was shown by the very different interpretations put upon it. Dealing as it did in incomparably brilliant fashion with a subject of living interest, the Essay at once attracted attention both at home and abroad, and Pope was attacked by a Swiss professor as an ally of the freethinkers. But a champion of his orthodoxy was found in Warburton. Pope was so delighted with the pugnacious paradoxist s reply to De Crousaz that he made Warburton s acquaintance. The readiness with which Pope allowed Warburton to take possession of himself and his works in his old age was not a symptom of senile weakness. It was an act of that characteristic business-like acuteness which he showed throughout in the management of his reputation. He saw that as long as Warburton was the authorized com mentator on his works there Avas not likely to be any lack of critical debate about him and about them. The Essay on Man, which may be said to contain the essence of the thought of men of the world in his genera tion on its subject such was the poet s skill and judg ment in collecting the substance of floating opinion was announced by Pope as part of a system of &quot;pieces on human life and manners.&quot; Whether Warburton was authorized or not in his sketch of Pope s intentions, the so-called Moral Essays (published at intervals between 1731 and 1735) which Warburton connected with the general plan have each an independent interest. They contain some of the most brilliant of Pope s satirical portraits, and his famous theory of &quot; the ruling passion.&quot; If space permitted it might easily be shown that in this theory Pope proved himself a better psychologist than Macaulay, who subjects it to much misunderstanding ridicule. Pope died on the 30th May 1744, and was buried in the church of Twickenham. His own ruling passion was what a poet of his generation described as the universal passion, the love of fame. Under the influence of this passion he tried to support his reputation by intrigues such as the statesmen of his time used in climbing the ladder and keeping themselves in place. He had no moral scruple where this was concerned everything gave way before the ruling passion. For some of these intrigues, so incon gruous with our idea of a poet s character, he has suffered severe retribution. Especially of late years he has been violently denounced as little better than a common swindler for his petty manoeuvres in connexion with the publication of his letters letters designed to exhibit him as a pattern of friendship, magnanimity, and all the virtues. These manoeuvres, which were first tracked with great patience and ingenuity by Mr Dilke, 1 are too intricate to be recorded in short space. This, in effect, is what he seems to have done. He collected his letters from his friends, retouched them, changed dates and passages to suit the picture of himself which he wished to present, deposited the collection thus manipulated in the safe-keeping of the earl of Oxford, then sent a printed book of them to Curll, and intrigued to make it appear that they had been fraudulently pub lished without his consent. It was a ridiculously petty action, but to characterize it as Mr Elwin has done will be fair when it is customary to use similar language about the intrigues of statesmen and diplomatists. To apply it to Pope at present is not to call a spade a spade, but a molehill a mountain. Recent revelations have not affected by one iota Johnson s judgment of his character. The man who 1 See Papers of a Critic. &quot; played the politician about cabbages and turnips,&quot; and &quot; hardly drank tea without a stratagem,&quot; was not likely to be straightforward in a matter in which his ruling passion was concerned. Against Pope s petulance and &quot;general love of secrecy and cunning &quot; have to be set, in any fair judg ment of his character, his exemplary conduct as a son, the affection with which he was regarded in his own circle of intimates, and many well-authenticated instances of genuine kindliness to persons in distress. (w. M.) POPEDOM. 2 Both the ecclesiastical and the temporal authority formerly exercised and still claimed by the popes of Rome profess to be of divine appointment, appealing in the first place to the language of the New Testament, and in the next to the tradition of the church, handed down, as it is asserted, in unbroken continuity from apostolic times to the present age. According to the theory thus put forth, Peter the apostle was indicated by Christ Himself as superior to the rest of the twelve in faith and spiritual discernment, and as the one of the number whom it was His design to invest with special pre-eminence. In like manner, the church itself which Peter was after- st Peter wards to found and to preside over was predestined to a at Rome, like superiority among other churches, while his personal superiority was to be vested in perpetuity in his successors. In conformity with this divine design Peter, accompanied by Paul, went to Rome after Christ s death, and founded there a church over which he presided as its bishop for twenty-five years, from the first year of the reign of Claudius, 41 A.D., to 67 A.D., eventually suffering martyr dom in the same year and on the same day as St Paul, in the persecution under Nero. And, if we accept the records preserved in the Roman Church, we shall believe that St Peter s successors, so long as Christianity was the object of state persecution, continued heroically to encounter the same glorious fate, the distinction of martyrdom being assigned in the Roman calendar to all but two of the bishops of Rome from Linus to Eusebius (see list at con clusion of article). In dealing with a subject in Avhich the evidence is frequently ambiguous and conflicting, and sometimes of more than doubtful genuineness, and with a period of much obscurity, no amount of research will often serve to point to more than a conjectural conclusion. But, inas much as it is on the basis of the assumptions involved in the above theory that the claims of the Church of Rome mainly rest, it will be desirable to state, as concisely as possible, the main facts and arguments on which those who deny these assumptions ground their contrary opinion. The question whether or no St Peter was designed for Theory of pre-eminence among the apostles resolves itself, it is his pre- evident, into one of New Testament criticism ; but from er&amp;gt; the time of Origen, who visited Rome early in the 3d a century, when the theory first began to be put forward, there has always been a certain section in the church who have distinctly repudiated the affirmative assumption. &quot;For if,&quot; says Origen, &quot;you hold that the whole church was built by God on- Peter alone, what will you say con cerning John, the son of thunder, and each of the other apostles?&quot; (Migne, Patrologia Gr&ca, xiii. 397). Next, as regards the evidence for St Peter s presence in Rome and lengthened labours there, as the head of a Christian con gregation, it is maintained by the great majority of Protestant scholars that there is no proof that he was ever in Rome at all ; that the &quot; Babylon &quot; referred to in his first epistle (ch. v. 13) is really the distant city of the 2 The design of the present article is simply to give the main outlines of the history of the Papacy as an institution ; the details connected with the personal history of each pontiff will be found under the respective names of the different popes. The dates immediately after the name of each pope denote the period of his pontificate.