With the change in his view of Pope's genius, there was a complete revolution in Warburton's estimate of the Essay on Man. The work ceased to be made up "from the worst passages of the worst authors." A superlative originality took the place of ignorant plagiarism, and "he uttered heavy menaces," says Bishop Law, "against those who presumed to insinuate that Pope borrowed anything from any man whatsoever."[787] The "rank atheism," in like manner, was converted into the purest orthodoxy, and every line breathed forth piety and sound philosophy. "He follows truth," said his advocate, "uniformly throughout."[788] The strain of sickening adulation in which Warburton conveyed his newly-born admiration showed that arrogance was not more congenial to his nature than servility, and both were rivalled by the effrontery with which he spoke of those who shared his old opinions. He and the "gentlemen of the Dunciad" had agreed in thinking ill of Pope's morals, but the conviction was genuine with Warburton, and "pretence" in them.[789] He declaimed against the "rank atheism" of the Essay on Man, but the freethinkers who had believed that Pope was of "their party" had "affectedly embraced the delusion."[790] Warburton's accusations of insincerity were the more unblushing that his recantation was partly feigned. When he published his defence of three epistles of the Essay on Man, he said that Pope's "strong and delicate reasoning ran equally through all" the poem, but that "the turn of the fourth epistle being more popular seemed to need no comment."[791] His real motive for passing over the fourth epistle was very different, and comes out in a letter to Dr. Birch, Oct. 25, 1739. "I have been looking over, _inter nos_, the fourth epistle of the Essay on Man; for I have a great inclination to make an analysis of that to complete the whole. I find this part of my defence of Mr. Pope as difficult as a confutation of Mr. Crousaz's nonsense, and a detection of the translator's blunders, are easy. I do not know whether I can do it to my mind, or whether I shall do it at all, so beg you would keep it secret."[792] He left the fourth epistle undefended because it was almost beyond his powers of sophistry to devise a defence, and professed to the world that "the strong and delicate reasoning was too popular to need a comment." Having undertaken the "difficult" task, he kept up the dissimulation, justified every doctrine the epistle contained, and lauded it, in common with the rest of the work, for its "exact reasoning," and for "a precision, force, and closeness of connection rarely to be met with, even in the most formal treatises of philosophy."[793] His want of sincerity would be self-evident without the contradiction between his confidential confessions, and his public praise. No one, with his knowledge of philosophical divinity, could possibly have magnified Pope in good faith for the qualities in which he was deplorably deficient.