Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

222
The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift
morbid pleasure in parading the harsher features of his nature. If
we bear this in mind, the facts of his life seem entirely incompatible
with the hypothesis of habitual concealed unbelief. I do not allude
merely to the vehemence with which he at all times defended the
interests of the Church, nor yet to the scrupulousness with which he
discharged his functions as a clergyman, to his increasing his duties
by reading prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays at Laracor, and daily
at St. Patrick’s, to his administering the Sacrament every week, and
paying great attention to his choir, and to all other matters connected
with his deanery. In these respects he appears to have been wholly
beyond reproach, and Hawkesworth has described the solemnity of his
manner in the pulpit and the reading-desk, and in the grace which he
pronounced at meals. But much more significant than these things are
the many instances of concealed religion that were discovered by his
friends. Delany had been weeks in his house before he found out that
he had family prayers every morning with his servants. In London he
rose early to attend public worship at an hour when he might escape
the notice of his friends. Though he was never a rich man, he systematically
allotted a third of his income to the poor, and he continued
his unostentatious charity when extreme misanthropy and growing
avarice must have rendered it peculiarly trying. He was observed in
his later years, when his mind had given way, and when it was found
necessary to watch him, pursuing his private devotions with undeviating
regularity, and some of his letters, written under circumstances of
agonizing sorrow, contain religious expressions of the most touching
character. Many things which he wrote could not have been written
by a reverent or deeply pious man, but his “Proposal for the Advancement
of Religion,” his admirable letter to a young clergyman on the
qualities that are requisite in his profession, the singularly beautiful
prayers which he wrote for the use of Stella when she was dying, are all
worthy of a high place in religious literature. His sermons, as he said
himself, were too like pamphlets, but they are full of good sense and
sound piety admirably and decorously expressed. Of the most political
of them—that “On Doing Good”—Burke has said that it “contains
perhaps the best motives to patriotism that were ever delivered within
so small a compass.”
It must be added that the coarseness for which Swift has been
so often and so justly censured is not the coarseness of vice. He
accumulates images of a kind that most men would have regarded