The Sin of Wit

Swift was obviously a serious Christian. Gulliver’s Travels shows an abiding concern for both the meaning of the word Christian and the moral obligations that a Christian conscience entails. He confronts the limitations of deism and the corruptions of the Church. But Swift belongs to that period in English literature when England was recovering from the religious enthusiasm of the Civil War. He has read Hobbes, who described imagination as “nothing but decaying sense.” He takes a good deal from Locke, whose materialist psychology informs The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), a satire on religious enthusiasm. He despised spiritual and stylistic pretension, and in this respect his religious and literary outlook were unified. Read Full Article »