One of Jesus Christ's main lesson to man was the importance of complete love of oneself and one's neighbors. Christianity emphasizes how love is man's savior, the emotion that can give man eternal life. And yet, humans possess many drastically different and easier emotions to follow than love: envy, greed, malice, etc. This capability of emotion then can also be man's destruction, a theme thoroughly illustrated throughout Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. History has proven, however, that man's ability to resist the temptations of these ruinous emotions is disastrously weak. Can the human race, as a whole, reach perfection with emotions to lead them? Lust for power or some other evil always seems to corrupt even the most originally well planned governments that had love for the people and their freedom as its basis. In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift comes to the conclusion that only complete loss of emotion can lead to true reason and a perfect society. .
Gulliver's fourth journey, widely considered to be the most profound, is to the a land populated by talking horses with more rationality than the average human. These Houyhnhms, as they are called, live in a simple, civilized culture free any hindering emotion. The families, though they care for their young, have no love for them, yet no hate either. They may have friends to whom they enjoy conversing with but no real attachment is formed, and so everyone, even a distant stranger is treated with the same mutual civility. Marriages are made based on mixing the best breeds. "Courtship, love, presents, jointures, settlements, have no place in their heads" (281). And when a Houyhnhm dies, no one sheds any tears, the end is considered a natural part of life. Gulliver finds himself realizing the great faults of the human race and wishing to be Houyhnhm. Swift demonstrates through the Houyhnhms that the answer to mankind's propensity towards evil is to lose all human emotion.
