’Your lordship has formerly advised me to read the best controversies between the churches.  Shall I tell you a secret?  I did so at 14 years old (for I loved reading, and my father had no other books) there was a collection of all that had been written on both sides, in the reign of King James II.  I warmed my head with them, and the consequence was, I found myself a Papist, or a Protestant by turns, according to the last book I read.  I am afraid most seekers are in the same case, and when they stop, they are not so properly converted, as outwitted.  You see how little glory you would gain by my conversion:  and after all, I verily believe, your lordship and I are both of the same religion, if we were thoroughly understood by one another, and that all honest and reasonable Christians would be so, if they did but talk enough together every day, and had nothing to do together but to serve God, and live in peace with their neighbours.

“As to the temporal side of the question, I can have no dispute with you; it is certain, all the beneficial circumstances of life, and all the shining ones, lie on the part you would invite me to.  But if I could bring myself to fancy, what I think you do but fancy, that I have any talents for active life, I want health for it; and besides it is a real truth.  I have, if possible, less inclination, than ability.  Contemplative life is not only my scene, but is my habit too.  I begun my life where most people end theirs, with all that the world calls ambition.  I don’t know why it is called so, for, to me, it always seemed to be stooping, or climbing.  I’ll tell you my politic and religious sentiments in a few words.  In my politics, I think no farther, than how to preserve my peace of life, in any government under which I live; nor in my religion, than to preserve the peace of my conscience, in any church with which I communicate.  I hope all churches, and all governments are so far of God, as they are rightly understood, and rightly administered; and where they are, or may be wrong, I leave it to God alone to mend, or reform them, which, whenever he does, it must be by greater instruments than I am.  I am not a Papist, for I renounce the temporal invasions of the papal power, and detest their arrogated authority over Princes and States.  I am a Catholic in the strictest sense of the word.  If I was born under an absolute Prince, I would be a quiet subject; but, I thank God, I was not.  I have a due sense of the excellence of the British constitution.  In a word, the things I have always wished to see, are not a Roman Catholic, or a French Catholic, or a Spanish Catholic, but a True Catholic; and not a King of Whigs, or [Transcriber’s note:  repeated ‘or’ removed] a King of Tories, but a King of England.”

These are the peaceful maxims upon which we find Mr. Pope conducted his life, and if they cannot in some respects be justified, yet it must be owned, that his religion and his politics were well enough adapted for a poet, which entitled him to a kind of universal patronage, and to make every good man his friend.