Abstract
Although not written as part of the Ancients-Moderns Controversy, The Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708) belongs with the other satires that treat modern inwardness and self-reliance. Unlike “A Modest Proposal,” the Argument is an essay as well as a satire, indeed one of Swift’s most complex satires. Offered here is a close reading of the Argument different from that of, for instance, Irvin Ehrenpreis in his monumental biography of Swift. The focus is the critical importance of outward manifestations of belief.
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Notes
Donald Davie, These the Companions: Recollections (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 169–70.
Jonathan Swift, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in “A Tale of a Tub” and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 276n, 280.
Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, Vol. II (Dr. Swift) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969), 276.
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in “Gulliver’s Travels” and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifllin, 1960).
John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford UP, 1962).
T.S. Eliot, Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928).
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
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© 2013 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2013). “The Physical Act of Worship, Not the Mental Act of Belief or Assent”: Reading An Argument against Abolishing Christianity. In: Swift’s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311047_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311047_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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