Mankind

Alexander Pope was one of the greatest of England's "Spiritual Poets." In his "Essay on Man" he sets out universal truths that echo all that Spiritualism propounds. Here are some extracts:

Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives the Hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Lo, the poor Indian! Whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul, proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To Be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no Angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Vast chain of Being, which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to Nothing. On superior pow’rs
Were we to press, inferior might on ours:
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed:
From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in th’ ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns.
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects and equals all.

All Nature is but Art unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

Pope, in his rhyming couplets has pin-pointed two vital aspects of life. First humanity’s pride in its ability to reason and how in our arrogance, this has led us down many blind alleys, including thinking we are special and above all other creation. “From pride, from pride, our very reasoning springs,” he cries. Second, he pinpoints the awesome, beautiful symmetry of the natural world, whether in the fields, on the hills around us, in the heavens or in the heart of the atom. Unlike many scientists however, Pope recognises the need for humility and sees just how much we do not know and probably will never know whilst here on earth.

Extracted from the book "Please God Why?" by Lionel Owen