Warburton reversed the parts. The "seven or eight sheets," which contained Bolingbroke's prose draught of the Essay on Man, have not been preserved in their original form, and he did not reduce his published philosophy to writing till after the poem was commenced. "If," said Warburton, in allusion to the latter circumstance, "you will take his lordship's word, or, indeed, attend to his argument, you will find that Pope was so far from putting his prose into verse that he has put Pope's verse into prose."[749] But when Bolingbroke mentioned that the Essay on Man was begun before his published disquisitions were committed to paper, he added that they were "nothing more than repetitions of conversations" with Pope.[750] This statement Warburton was dishonest enough to suppress, and deliberately turned a half truth into a falsehood. The ungarbled expressions of Bolingbroke confirm the assurances of Pope and Bathurst, that he was the principal author of the philosophy in the Essay on Man. Warburton could not keep to his misrepresentation. When it was convenient for his purpose he changed his story, and Pope became "a pupil who had to be reasoned out of Bolingbroke's hands,"--a dupe who adopted Bolingbroke's insidious doctrines without perceiving the infidelity, and who had to thank his deliverer that "the poem was put on the side of religion."[751] Mrs. Mallet told General Grimouard that Pope, Bolingbroke, and their friends, who frequented her house, were "a society of pure deists."[752] Bolingbroke was more of an infidel than Pope, for though he admitted that a future state could not be disproved, he laboured passionately to discredit the arguments in its favour. Pope held to the immortality of the soul. "He was a deist," says Lord Chesterfield, "believing in a future state; this he has often owned himself to me."[753] He frequently avowed his deism to Lyttelton, and acquiesced in the deistical interpretations which the Richardsons put on the Essay on Man. Revelation he rejected entirely. Lord Chesterfield relates that he once saw a bible on his table, and adds, "As I knew his way of thinking upon that book, I asked him jocosely if he was going to write an answer to it?" The evidence that he had renounced Christianity comes to us from various independent sources, and some of the witnesses are above the suspicion of misunderstanding or misrepresenting him.