Page 39 - Gullivers

Battle of the Boyne, won by William and his Protestant forces in July 1690; James and many Catholics fled to France and the Protestants took power in Ireland, not only establishing the Church of Ireland as the official church of the state but sweeping Catholics out of Parliament and off their land. The turbulence of Swift’s youth was succeeded by a period of apparent calm under the rule of what became the Protestant Ascendancy. But human nature remained constant, and the people who surrounded Swift after 1690 – in Ireland or in England, where he spent much of the 1690s – were just as double- dealing, dishonest, proud, self-interested and self-deceiving as those he had known in his youth.
As Swift grew to manhood and began grooming himself to be a writer, he could see how far the actual behaviour of men and women differed from the Christian ideals to which everyone was meant to aspire; it was this sense of double values and of man’s refusal to recognise the extent of his self-deception that was to influence all his work, including Gulliver’s Travels. Swift himself was a Christian
– indeed, he became an ordained minister of the Church of Ireland in the 1690s –
and so was forced to confront a great and irresolvable paradox: within all human beings is a spark (sometimes only a spark, sometimes a spark kindled to a flame)
of generosity and goodness which should encourage everyone to live a life of brotherly love, tolerance and forgiveness; people seeking to live in this way fill their lives with the rhetoric of the Christian way of life. On the other hand, the same human beings can, in a moment, justify the most appalling cruelty and rapacity, twisting the rhetoric of their old position to suit the new. Even the Christian churches themselves, the Catholic, Protestant Episcopalian and Presbyterian sects, had (in Swift’s eyes) perverted
the message of love passed by God to mankind, and become rapacious, self- interested and self-deceiving. Equally, good and honourable intentions in other areas – in learning, in the dissemination of ideas and cultures, in the development of a fair and just society – these too
had been twisted by the subtle use of rhetoric until what was said and done was almost the opposite of what it claimed
to be. Words can not only be the medium for the transmission of ‘right’ ideas
but, twisted and distorted, can drag the