For it must be remembered that, in spite of much that has been said to the contrary, and in spite of the true tendency of much so-called orthodoxy, the profession of open dissent from Christian doctrine was then regarded with extreme disapproval.

It might be a fashion, as Butler and others declare, to talk infidelity in cultivated circles; but a public promulgation of unbelief was condemned as criminal, and worthy only of the Grub-street faction.

Pope, therefore, was terribly shocked when he found himself accused of heterodoxy.

His poem was at once translated, and, we are told, spread rapidly in France, where Voltaire and many inferior writers were introducing the contagion of English freethinking.
A solid Swiss pastor and professor of philosophy, Jean Pierre Crousaz (1663-1750), undertook the task of refutation, and published an examination of Pope's philosophy in 1737 and 1738.

A serious examination of this bundle of half-digested opinions was in itself absurd.