The youngest son of the seventeen children of a Boston tallow-chandler
named Franklin was born a subject of Queen Anne of England, on the 6th
of January, 1706; and on the same day received the baptismal name of
Benjamin at the Old South Church in that city. He continued for more
than seventy of the eighty-four years of his life a subject of four
successive British monarchs. During that period, neither Anne nor
either of the three Georges who succeeded her had a subject of whom
they had more reason to be proud, nor one whom at his death their
people generally supposed they had more reason to detest. No
Englishman of his generation can now be said to have established a
more enduring fame, in any way, than Franklin established in many
ways. As a printer, as a journalist, as a diplomatist, as a statesman,
as a philosopher, he was easily first among his peers.
On the other hand, it is no disparagement of the services of any of
his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, to say that no one
of his generation contributed more effectually to the dissolution of
the bonds which united the principal British-American colonies to the
mother country, and towards conferring upon them independence and a
popular government.
As a practical printer Franklin was reported to have had no superiors;
as a journalist he exerted an influence not only unrivaled in his day,
but more potent, on this continent at least, than either of his
sovereigns or their Parliaments. The organization of a police, and
later of the militia, for Philadelphia; of companies for extinguishing
fires; making the sweeping and paving of the streets a municipal
function; the formation of the first public library for Philadelphia,
and the establishment of an academy which has matured into the now
famous University of Pennsylvania, were among the conspicuous reforms
which he planted and watered in the columns of the Philadelphia
Gazette. This journal he founded; upon the earnings of it he mainly
subsisted during a long life, and any sheet of it to-day would bring a
larger price in the open market probably than a single sheet of any
other periodical ever published.
Franklin's Almanack, his crowning work in the sphere of journalism,
published under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders,--better known since
as Poor Richard,--is still one of the marvels of modern literature.
Under one or another of many titles the contents of this publication,
exclusive of its calendars, have been translated into every tongue
having any pretensions to a literature; and have had more readers,
probably, than any other publication in the English or indeed in any
other language, with the single exception of the Bible. It was the
first issue from an American press that found a popular welcome in
foreign lands, and it still enjoys the special distinction of being
the only almanac ever published that owed its extraordinary popularity
entirely to its literary merit.
What adds to the surprise with which we contemplate the fame and
fortunes of this unpretentious publication, is the fact that its
reputation was established by its first number, and when its author
was only twenty-six years of age. For a period of twenty-six years,
and until Franklin ceased to edit it, this annual was looked forward
to by a larger portion of the colonial population and with more
impatience than now awaits a President's annual message to Congress.
Franklin graduated from journalism into diplomacy as naturally as
winter glides into spring. This was simply because he was by common
acclaim the fittest man for any kind of public service the colony
possessed, and especially for any duty requiring talents for
persuasion, in which he proved himself to be unquestionably past
master among the diplomatists of his time.
The question of taxing the Penn proprietary estates in Pennsylvania,
for the defense of the province from the French and Indians, had
assumed such an acute stage in 1757 that the Assembly decided to
petition the King upon the subject; and selected Franklin, then in the
forty-first year of his age, to visit London and present their
petition. The next forty-one years of his life were practically all
spent in the diplomatic service. He was five years absent on this his
first mission. Every interest in London was against him. He finally
surmounted all obstacles by a compromise, which pledged the Assembly
to pass an act exempting from taxation the unsurveyed lands of the
Penn estate,--the surveyed waste lands, however, to be assessed at the
usual rate. For his success the Penns and their partisans never
forgave him, and his fellow colonists never forgot him.
Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, but not to remain. The
question of taxing the colonies without representation was soon thrust
upon them in the shape of a stamp duty, and Franklin was sent out
again to urge its repeal. He reached London in November 1764, where he
remained the next eleven years and until it became apparent that the
surrender of the right to arbitrarily tax the colonies would never be
made by England during the life of the reigning sovereign, George III.
Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, he sailed for
Philadelphia on the 21st of March, 1775; and on the morning of his
arrival was elected by the Assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the
Continental Congress which consolidated the armies of the colonies,
placed General George Washington in command of them, issued the first
Continental currency, and assumed the responsibility of resisting the
imperial government; his last hope of maintaining the integrity of the
empire having been dissipated by recent collisions between the people
and the royalist troops at Concord and Lexington. Franklin served on
ten committees in this Congress. He was one of the five who drew up
the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, and in September
following was chosen unanimously as one of the three commissioners to
be sent out to solicit for the infant republic the aid of France and
the sympathies of continental Europe. In this mission, the importance
of which to his country can hardly be exaggerated, he was greatly
favored by the reputation which had preceded him as a man of science.
While yet a journalist he had made some experiments in electricity,
which established its identity with lightning. The publication by an
English correspondent of the letters in which he gave an account of
these experiments, secured his election as an honorary member of the
Royal Society of London and undisputed rank among the most eminent
natural philosophers of his time. When he arrived in Paris, therefore,
he was already a member of every important learned society in Europe,
one of the managers of the Royal Society of London, and one of the
eight foreign members of the Royal Academy in Paris, where three
editions of his scientific writings had already been printed. To these
advantages must be added another of even greater weight: his errand
there was to assist in dismembering the British Empire, than which
nothing of a political nature was at this time much nearer every
Frenchman's heart.
The history of this mission, and how Franklin succeeded in procuring
from the French King financial aid to the amount of twenty-six
millions of francs, at times when the very existence of the republic
depended upon them, and finally a treaty of peace more favorable to
his country than either England or France wished to concede, has been
often told; and there is no chapter in the chronicles of this republic
with which the world is more familiar.
Franklin's reputation grew with his success. "It was," wrote his
colleague John Adams, "more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton,
Frederick the Great or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and
esteemed than all of them.... If a collection could be made of all the
gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the eighteenth century, a
greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon _le grand Franklin_
would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever
lived."
A few weeks after signing the definitive treaty of peace in 1783,
Franklin renewed an application which he had previously made just
after signing the preliminary treaty, to be relieved of his mission;
but it was not until the 7th of March, 1785, that Congress adopted a
resolution permitting "the Honorable Benjamin Franklin to return to
America as soon as convenient." Three days later, Thomas Jefferson was
appointed to succeed him.
On the 13th of September, 1785, and after a sojourn of nearly nine
years in the French capital, first in the capacity of commissioner and
subsequently of minister plenipotentiary, Franklin once more landed in
Philadelphia, on the same wharf on which, sixty-two years before, he
had stepped, a friendless and practically penniless runaway apprentice
of seventeen.
Though now in his seventy-ninth year, and a prey to infirmities not
the necessary incidents of old age, he had scarcely unpacked his
trunks after his return when he was chosen a member of the municipal
council of Philadelphia, and its chairman. Shortly after, he was
elected president of Pennsylvania, his own vote only lacking to make
the vote unanimous. "I have not firmness," he wrote to a friend, "to
resist the unanimous desire of my countryfolks; and I find myself
harnessed again into their service another year. They engrossed the
prime of my life; they have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to
pick my bones."
He was unanimously re-elected to this dignity for the two succeeding
years, and while holding that office was chosen a member of the
convention which met in May 1787 to frame the Constitution under which
the people of the United States are still living.
With the adoption of that instrument, to which he probably contributed
as much as any other individual, he retired from official life; though
not from the service of the public, to which for the remaining years
of his stay on earth his genius and his talents were faithfully
consecrated.
Among the fruits of that unfamiliar leisure, always to be remembered
among the noblest achievements of his illustrious career, was the part
he had in organizing the first anti-slavery society in the world; and
as its president, writing and signing the first remonstrance against
slavery ever addressed to the Congress of the United States.
In surveying the life of Dr. Franklin as a whole, the thing that most
impresses one is his constant study and singleness of purpose to
promote the welfare of human society. It was his daily theme as a
journalist, and his yearly theme as an almanac-maker. It is that
which first occurs to us when we recall his career as a member of the
Colonial Assembly; as an agent of the provinces in England; as a
diplomatist in France; and as a member of the conventions which
crowned the consistent labors of his long life. Nor are there any now
so bold as to affirm that there was any other person who could have
been depended upon to accomplish for his country or the world, what
Franklin did in any of the several stages of his versatile career.
Though holding office for more than half of his life, the office
always sought Franklin, not Franklin the office. When sent to England
as the agent of the colony, he withdrew from business with a modest
competence judiciously invested mostly in real estate. He never seems
to have given a thought to its increase. Frugal in his habits, simple
in his tastes, wise in his indulgences, he died with a fortune neither
too large nor too small for his fame as a citizen or a patriot. For
teaching frugality and economy to the colonists, when frugality and
economy were indispensable to the conservation of their independence
and manhood, he has been sneered at as the teacher of a
"candle-end-saving philosophy," and his 'Poor Richard' as a
"collection of receipts for laying up treasures on earth rather than
in heaven." Franklin never taught, either by precept or example, to
lay up treasures on earth. He taught the virtues of industry, thrift,
and economy, as the virtues supremely important in his time, to keep
people out of debt and to provide the means of educating and
dignifying society. He never countenanced the accumulation of wealth
for its own sake, but for its uses,--its prompt convertibility into
social comforts and refinements. It would be difficult to name another
man of any age to whom an ambition to accumulate wealth as an end
could be imputed with less propriety. Though probably the most
inventive genius of his age, and thus indirectly the founder of many
fortunes, he never asked a patent for any of his inventions or
discoveries. Though one of the best writers of the English language
that his country has yet produced, he never wrote a line for money
after he withdrew from the calling by which he made a modest provision
for his family.
For the remaining half of his life both at home and abroad, though
constantly operating upon public opinion by his pen, he never availed
himself of a copyright or received a penny from any publisher or
patron for any of these labors. In none of the public positions which
he held, even when minister plenipotentiary, did his pay equal his
expenditures. He was three years president of Pennsylvania after his
return from France, and for his services declined to appropriate to
his own use anything beyond his necessary expenditures for stationery,
postage, and transportation. It is not by such methods that men
justly incur the implied reproach of "laying up treasures on earth,"
or of teaching a candle-end-saving philosophy.
Franklin courted fame no more than fortune. The best of his writings,
after his retirement from journalism, he never gave to the press at
all; not even his incomparable autobiography, which is still
republished more frequently than any of the writings of Dickens or of
Thackeray. He always wrote for a larger purpose than mere personal
gratification of any kind. Even his bagatelles and _jeux d'esprit_
read in the salons of Paris, though apparently intended for the eyes
of a small circle, were inspired by a desire to make friends and
create respect for the struggling people and the great cause he
represented. Few if any of them got into print until many years after
his decease.
Franklin was from his youth up a leader, a lion in whatever circle he
entered, whether in the printing-house, the provincial Assemblies, as
agent in England, or as a courtier in France. There was no one too
eminent in science or literature, on either side of the Atlantic, not
to esteem his acquaintance a privilege. He was an honorary member of
every important scientific association in the world, and in friendly
correspondence with most of those who conferred upon those bodies any
distinction; and all this by force of a personal, not to say
planetary, attraction that no one brought within his sphere could long
resist.
Pretty much all of importance that we know of Franklin we gather from
his private correspondence. His contemporaries wrote or at least
printed very little about him; scarcely one of the multitude whose
names he embalmed in his 'Autobiography' ever printed a line about
him. All that we know of the later half of his life not covered by his
autobiography, we owe almost exclusively to his private and official
correspondence. Though reckoning among his warm friends and
correspondents such men as David Hume, Dr. Joseph Priestley, Dr.
Price, Lord Kames, Lord Chatham, Dr. Fothergill, Peter Collinson,
Edmund Burke, the Bishop of St. Asaph and his gifted daughters,
Voltaire, the habitues of the Helvetius salon, the Marquis de Segur,
the Count de Vergennes, his near neighbors De Chaumont and Le
Veillard, the _maire_ of Passy,--all that we learn of his
achievements, of his conversation, of his daily life, from these or
many other associates of only less prominence in the Old World, might
be written on a single foolscap sheet. Nor are we under much greater
obligations to his American friends. It is to his own letters (and
except his 'Autobiography,' he can hardly be said to have written
anything in any other than the epistolary form; and that was written
in the form of a letter to his son William, and most of it only began
to be published a quarter of a century after his death) that we must
turn to learn how full of interest and importance to mankind was this
last half-century of his life. Beyond keeping copies of his
correspondence, which his official character made a duty as well as a
necessity, he appears to have taken no precautions to insure the
posthumous fame to which his correspondence during that period was
destined to contribute so much. Hence, all the biographies--and they
are numberless--owe almost their entire interest and value to his own
pen. All, so far as they are biographies, are autobiographies; and for
that reason it may be fairly said that all of them are interesting.
It is also quite remarkable that though Franklin's life was a
continuous warfare, he had no personal enemies. His extraordinary and
even intimate experience of every phase of human life, from the very
lowest to the very highest, had made him so tolerant that he regarded
differences of opinion and of habits much as he regarded the changes
of the weather,--as good or bad for his purposes, but which, though he
might sometimes deplore, he had no right to quarrel with or assume
personal responsibility for. Hence he never said or did things
personally offensive. The causes that he represented had enemies, for
he was all his life a reformer. All men who are good for anything have
such enemies. "I have, as you observe," wrote Franklin to John Jay the
year that he retired from the French mission, "some enemies in
England, but they are my enemies as an American; I have also two or
three in America who are my enemies as a minister; but I thank God
there are not in the whole world any who are my enemies as a man: for
by his grace, through a long life, I have been enabled so to conduct
myself that there does not exist a human being who can justly say,
'Ben Franklin has wronged me.' This, my friend, is in old age a
comfortable reflection. You too have or may have your enemies; but let
not that render you unhappy. If you make a right use of them, they
will do you more good than harm. They point out to us our faults; they
put us upon our guard and help us to live more correctly."
Franklin's place in literature as a writer has not been generally
appreciated, probably because with him writing was only a means, never
an end, and his ends always dwarfed his means, however effective. He
wrote to persuade others, never to parade his literary skill. He never
wrote a dull line, and was never _nimious_. The longest production of
his pen was his autobiography, written during the closing years of his
life. Nearly all that he wrote besides was in the form of letters,
which would hardly average three octavo pages in length. And yet
whatever the subject he touched upon, he never left the impression of
incompleteness or of inconclusiveness. Of him may be said, perhaps
with as much propriety as of any other man, that he never said a word
too soon, nor a word too late, nor a word too much. Tons of paper have
been devoted to dissuasives from dueling, but the argument was never
put more effectively than Franklin put it in these dozen lines of a
letter to a Mr. Percival, who had sent him a volume of literary and
moral dissertations.
"A gentleman in a coffee-house desired another to sit further
from him. 'Why so?'--'Because you stink.'--'That is an
affront, and you must fight me.'--'I will fight you if you
insist upon it, but I do not see how that will mend the
matter. For if you kill me, I shall stink too; and if I kill
you, you will stink, if possible, worse than at present.' How
can such miserable sinners as we are, entertain so much pride
as to conceit that every offense against our imagined honor
merits death? These petty princes, in their opinion, would
call that sovereign a tyrant who should put one of them to
death for a little uncivil language, though pointed at his
sacred person; yet every one of them makes himself judge in
his own cause, condemns the offender without a jury, and
undertakes himself to be the executioner."
Some one wrote him that the people in England were abusing the
Americans and speaking all manner of evil against them. Franklin
replied that this was natural enough:
"They impute to us the evil they wished us. They are angry
with us, and speak all manner of evil of us; but we flourish
notwithstanding. They put me in mind of a violent High Church
factor, resident in Boston when I was a boy. He had bought
upon speculation a Connecticut cargo of onions which he
flattered himself he might sell again to great profit; but
the price fell, and they lay upon his hands. He was heartily
vexed with his bargain, especially when he observed they
began to grow in his store he had filled with them. He showed
them one day to a friend. 'Here they are,' said he, 'and they
are growing too. I damn them every day, but I think they are
like the Presbyterians; the more I curse them, the more they
grow.'"
Mr. Jefferson tells us that Franklin was sitting by his side in the
convention while the delegates were picking his famous declaration of
Independence to pieces, and seeing how Jefferson was squirming under
their mutilations, comforted him with the following stories, the rare
excellence of which has given them a currency which has long since
worn off their novelty:--
"'I have made it a rule,' said he, 'whenever in my power, to
avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a
public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will
relate to you.
"'When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an
apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to
open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a
handsome sign-board with the proper inscription. He composed
it in these words: _John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells
Hats for ready Money_, with a figure of a hat subjoined. But
he thought he would submit it to his friends for their
amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word
_hatter_ tautologous, because followed by the words _makes
hats_, which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The
next observed that the word _makes_ might as well be omitted,
because his customers would not care who made the hats; if
good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made.
He struck it out. A third said he thought the words _for
ready money_ were useless, as it was not the custom of the
place to sell on credit: every one who purchased expected to
pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood,
_John Thompson sells hats_. "_Sells_ hats," says his next
friend; "why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What
then is the use of that word?" It was stricken out, and
_hats_ followed, the rather as there was one painted on the
board. So his inscription was ultimately reduced to _John
Thompson_, with the figure of a hat subjoined.'"
When the members were about to sign the document, Mr. Hancock is
reported to have said, "We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling
different ways; we must all hang together." "Yes," replied Franklin,
"we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang
separately."
The Doric simplicity of his style; his incomparable facility of
condensing a great principle into an apologue or an anecdote, many of
which, as he applied them, have become the folk-lore of all nations;
his habitual moderation of statement, his aversion to exaggeration,
his inflexible logic, and his perfect truthfulness,--made him one of
the most persuasive men of his time, and his writings a model which no
one can study without profit. A judicious selection from Franklin's
writings should constitute a part of the curriculum of every college
and high school that aspires to cultivate in its pupils a pure style
and correct literary taste.
There was one incident in Franklin's life, which, though more
frequently referred to in terms of reproach than any other, will
probably count for more in his favor in the Great Assize than any
other of his whole life. While yet in his teens he became a father
before he was a husband. He never did what men of the loftiest moral
pretensions not unfrequently do,--shirk as far as possible any
personal responsibility for this indiscretion. On the contrary, he
took the fruit of it to his home; gave him the best education the
schools of the country then afforded. When he went abroad, this son
accompanied him, was presented as his son wherever he went, was
presented in all the great houses in which he himself was received; he
entered him at the Inns of Court, and in due time had him admitted to
the English bar; made him his private secretary, and at an early age
caused him to be appointed by the Crown, Governor of New Jersey. The
father not only did everything to repair the wrong he had done his
son, but at a time when he was at the zenith of his fame and official
importance, publicly proclaimed it as one of the great errors of his
life. The world has always abounded with bastards; but with the
exception of crowned heads claiming to hold their sceptres by Divine
right, and therefore beyond the reach of popular criticism or
reproach, it would be difficult to name another parent of his
generation of anything like corresponding eminence with Franklin, who
had the courage and the magnanimity to expiate such a wrong to his
offspring so fully and effectively.
Franklin was not a member of the visible Church, nor did he ever
become the adherent of any sect. He was three years younger than
Jonathan Edwards, and in his youth heard his share of the then
prevailing theology of New England, of which Edwards was regarded, and
perhaps justly, as the most eminent exponent. The extremes to which
Edwards carried those doctrines at last so shocked the people of
Massachusetts that he was rather ignominiously expelled from his
pulpit at Northampton; and the people of Massachusetts, in very
considerable proportions, gradually wandered over into the Unitarian
communion. To Jonathan Edwards and the inflexible law of action and
reaction, more than to Priestley or any one else of their generation,
that sect owes to this day its numerical strength, its influence, and
its dignity, in New England. With the creed of that sect Dr. Franklin
had more in common than with any other, though he was much too wise a
man to suppose that there was but one gate of admission to the Holy
City. He believed in one God; that Jesus was the best man that ever
lived, and his example the most profitable one ever given us to
follow. He never succeeded in accepting the doctrine that Jehovah and
Jesus were one person, or that miracles attributed to the latter in
the Bible were ever worked. He thought the best service and sufficient
worship of God was in doing all the good we can to his creatures. He
therefore never occupied himself much with ecclesiastical ceremonies,
sectarian differences, or theological subtleties. A reverend candidate
for episcopal orders wrote to Franklin, complaining that the
Archbishop of Canterbury had refused to ordain him unless he would
take the oath of allegiance, which he was too patriotic a Yankee to
do. Franklin, in reply, asked what necessity there was for his being
connected with the Church of England; if it would not be as well were
it the Church of Ireland. Perhaps were he to apply to the Bishop of
Derry, who was a man of liberal sentiments, he might give him orders,
as of that Church. Should both England and Ireland refuse, Franklin
assumed that the Bishops of Sweden and Norway would refuse also,
unless the candidates embraced Lutheranism. He then added:--
"Next to becoming Presbyterians, the Episcopalian clergy of
America, in my humble opinion, cannot do better than to
follow the example of the first clergy of Scotland, soon
after the conversion of that country to Christianity. When
the King had built the cathedral of St. Andrew's, and
requested the King of Northumberland to lend his bishops to
ordain one for them, that their clergy might not as
heretofore be obliged to go to Northumberland for orders, and
their request was refused, they assembled in the cathedral,
and the mitre, crosier, and robes of a bishop being laid upon
the altar, they after earnest prayers for direction in their
choice elected one of their own number; when the King said to
him, "_Arise, go to the altar, and receive your office at the
hand of God._" His brethren led him to the altar, robed him,
put the crosier in his hand and the mitre on his head, and he
became the first Bishop of Scotland.
"If the British islands were sunk in the sea (and the surface
of this globe has suffered great changes), you would probably
take some such method as this; and if they persist in denying
your ordination, it is the same thing. A hundred years hence,
when people are more enlightened, it will be wondered at that
men in America, qualified by their learning and piety to pray
for and instruct their neighbors, should not be permitted to
do it till they had made a voyage of six thousand miles out
and home, to ask leave of a cross old gentleman at
Canterbury."
Franklin, however, was in no sense an agnostic. What he could not
understand he did not profess to understand or believe; neither was
he guilty of the presumption of holding that what he could not
understand, he might not have understood if he had been a wiser and
better man. Though impatient of cant and hypocrisy, especially in the
pulpit, he never spoke lightly of the Bible, or of the Church and its
offices. When his daughter Sally was about to marry, he wrote to
her:--
"My dear child, the natural prudence and goodness of heart
God has blest you with, make it less necessary for me to be
particular in giving you advice. I shall therefore only say,
that the more attentively dutiful and tender you are towards
your good mamma, the more you will recommend yourself to me.
But why should I mention _me_, when you have so much higher a
promise in the Commandments, that such conduct will recommend
you to the favor of God? You know I have many enemies, all
indeed on the public account (for I cannot recollect that I
have in a private capacity given just cause of offense to any
one whatever): yet they are enemies, and very bitter ones;
and you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree
to you, so that your slightest indiscretions will be
magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound
and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to
be extremely circumspect in all your behavior, that no
advantage may be given to their malevolence.
"Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of
devotion in the Common Prayer Book is your principal business
there, and if properly attended to will do more towards
amending the heart than sermons generally can do. For they
were composed by men of much greater piety and wisdom than
our common composers of sermons can pretend to be; and
therefore I wish you would never miss the prayer days: yet
I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the
preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better
than the man, as sweet and clear waters come through very
dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head, as you
seemed to express a little before I came away some
inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you
do."
I cannot more fitly close this imperfect sketch of America's
most illustrious citizen, than by quoting from a touching and
most affectionate letter from Mrs. Hewson (Margaret Stevenson),--one
of Franklin's worthiest, most faithful, and most valued
friends,--addressed to one of Franklin's oldest friends in England.
"We have lost that valued, venerable, kind friend whose
knowledge enlightened our minds and whose philanthropy warmed
our hearts. But we have the consolation to think that if a
life well spent in acts of universal benevolence to mankind,
a grateful acknowledgment of Divine favor, a patient
submission under severe chastisement, and an humble trust in
Almighty mercy, can insure the happiness of a future state,
our present loss is his gain. I was the faithful witness of
the closing scene, which he sustained with that calm
fortitude which characterized him through life. No repining,
no peevish expression ever escaped him during a confinement
of two years, in which, I believe, if every moment of ease
could be added together, would not amount to two whole
months. When the pain was not too violent to be amused, he
employed himself with his books, his pen, or in conversation
with his friends; and upon every occasion displayed the
clearness of his intellect and the cheerfulness of his
temper. Even when the intervals from pain were so short that
his words were frequently interrupted, I have known him to
hold a discourse in a sublime strain of piety. I say this to
you because I know it will give you pleasure.
"I never shall forget one day that I passed with our friend
last summer. I found him in bed in great agony; but when that
agony abated a little I asked if I should read to him. He
said yes; and the first book I met with was Johnson's 'Lives
of the Poets.' I read the 'Life of Watts,' who was a favorite
author with Dr. Franklin; and instead of lulling him to
sleep, it roused him to a display of the powers of his memory
and his reason. He repeated several of Watts's 'Lyric Poems,'
and descanted upon their sublimity in a strain worthy of them
and of their pious author. It is natural for us to wish that
an attention to some ceremonies had accompanied that religion
of the heart which I am convinced Dr. Franklin always
possessed; but let us who feel the benefit of them continue
to practice them, without thinking lightly of that piety
which could support pain without a murmur, and meet death
without terror."
Franklin made a somewhat more definite statement of his views on the
subject of religion, in reply to an inquiry from President Styles of
Yale College, who expressed a desire to know his opinion of Jesus of
Nazareth. Franklin's reply was written the last year of his life, and
in the eighty-fourth of his age:--
"You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first
time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your
curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify
it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of
the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he
ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we
render to him is doing good to his other children. That the
soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in
another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to
be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard
them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly
desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he
left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to
see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting
changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in
England, some doubts as to his Divinity; though it is a
question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it,
and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I
expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less
trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if
that belief has the good consequence, as probably it has, of
making his doctrines more respected and more observed;
especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it
amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of
the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.
"I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having
experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me
prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its
continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit
of meriting such goodness. My sentiments on this head you
will see in the copy of an old letter inclosed, which I wrote
in answer to one from an old religionist whom I had relieved
in a paralytic case by electricity, and who, being afraid I
should grow proud upon it, sent me his serious though rather
impertinent caution."
[Signature: John Bigelow]