CHAPTER II

Franklin's Religious Beliefs

Closely akin to Franklin's system of morals were his views about Religion.

Scattered through his writings are sentences full of gratitude to God for

His favor in lifting him up from such a low to such a high estate, in

bringing him substantially unscathed through the graver dangers and baser

temptations of human life, and in affording him the assurance that the

divine goodness, of which he had received such signal proofs in his career,

would not cease with his death. In the _Autobiography_, after alluding in

modest terms to the poverty and obscurity, in which he was born and bred,

and the affluence and reputation subsequently won by him, he says:

And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all

humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned

happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which

lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My

belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not

_presume_, that the same goodness will still be

exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or

enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may

experience as others have done; the complexion of my

future fortune being known to Him only in whose power

it is to bless to us even our afflictions.

These words, though they occur in the work which Franklin tells us was

written when he was not dressed for a ball, he well knew would be read by

other eyes than those of the son for whom they were primarily intended; but

one of his familiar letters to his wife, written some years before the

_Autobiography_ was begun, contains expressions equally devout; associated

on this occasion, however, with the aspirations for the welfare of his

fellow creatures which constituted the real religion of his life.

God is very good to us both in many Respects [he

wrote]. Let us enjoy his Favours with a thankful &

chearful Heart; and, as we can make no direct Return to

him, show our Sense of his Goodness to us, by

continuing to do Good to our Fellow Creatures, without

Regarding the Returns they make us, whether Good or

Bad. For they are all his Children, tho' they may

sometimes be our Enemies. The Friendships of this World

are changeable, uncertain, transitory Things; but his

Favour, if we can secure it, is an Inheritance forever.

With respect to the successful issue, to which a manifest Providence had,

after so many vicissitudes and perils, conducted the American Revolution,

he wrote to Josiah Quincy in words as solemn as a _Te Deum_:

Considering all our Mistakes and Mismanagements, it is

wonderful we have finished our Affair so well, and so

soon. Indeed, I am wrong in using that Expression, "_We

have finished our Affair so well_". Our Blunders have

been many, and they serve to manifest the Hand of

Providence more clearly in our Favour; so that we may

much more properly say, _These are Thy Doings, O Lord,

and they are marvellous in our Eyes_.

Franklin might well have seen the hand of Providence in the momentous

result for which he had dared so much and labored so long, and which meant

so much to human history, but its shaping power over the destiny of even

such a Murad the Unlucky as his hapless nephew, Benny Mecom, is recognized

by him in a letter to his beloved sister, Jane Mecom, and her husband when

Benny had gone off to seek his fortune as a printer in Antigua. "After

all," he concludes, "having taken care to do _what appears to be for the

best_, we must submit to God's providence, which orders all things really

for the best." On another occasion, in an ingenious paper on Water Spouts,

the sage philosopher, seeing in the benign manner in which the waters of

the ocean rid themselves of salt, in the process of evaporation, the same

God that the poor Indian sees in the clouds or hears in the wind,

impressively exclaims: "He who hath proportioned and given proper Qualities

to all Things, was not unmindful of this. Let us adore Him with Praise and

Thanksgiving." There are certain human feelings which rise in moments of

uncommon stress or fervor from the profoundest depths of our being to our

lips and take on the form and rhythm of sonorous religious utterance, if

for no better reason, because no other language is lofty or musical enough

to serve aptly the purposes of such supreme occasions; and this is true

even of an individuality so meagrely spiritual as that of Franklin.

Other expressions of the same character furnish a religious or

quasi-religious setting to Franklin's thoughts upon his own dissolution. To

his brave and cheerful spirit, which experienced so little difficulty in

accommodating its normal philosophy to all the fixed facts and laws of

existence, death was as natural as life--a thing not to be invited before

its time but to be accepted with unmurmuring serenity when it came. The

only certain things in this world, he said in his home-spun way, are death

and taxes.

It is the will of God and nature [he wrote in his

fifty-first year to Elizabeth Hubbard, after the death

of his brother John] that these mortal bodies be laid

aside, when the soul is to enter into real life. This

is rather an embryo state, a preparation for living. A

man is not completely born until he be dead. Why then

should we grieve, that a new child is born among the

immortals, a new member added to their happy society?

We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while

they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring

knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow creatures, is

a kind and benevolent act of God. When they become

unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain instead of

pleasure, instead of an aid become an incumbrance, and

answer none of the intentions for which they were

given, it is equally kind and benevolent, that a way is

provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that

way. We ourselves, in some cases, prudently choose a

partial death. A mangled painful limb, which cannot be

restored, we willingly cut off. He who plucks out a

tooth, parts with it freely, since the pain goes with

it; and he, who quits the whole body, parts at once

with all pains and possibilities of pains and diseases

which it was liable to, or capable of making him

suffer.

Our friend and we were invited abroad on a party of

pleasure, which is to last forever. His chair was ready

first, and he is gone before us. We could not all

conveniently start together; and why should you and I

be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and

know where to find him? Adieu.

It was a sane, bright conception of human destiny indeed which could

convert the grim ferryman of the Styx into little more than an obsequious

chairman, waiting at the portals of life until it suited the convenience of

his fare to issue from them.

That Being [he wrote to George Whitefield] who gave me

Existence, and thro' almost three-score Years has been

continually showering his Favours upon me, whose very

Chastisements have been Blessings to me; can I doubt

that he loves me? And, if he loves me, can I doubt that

he will go on to take care of me, not only here but

hereafter? This to some may seem Presumption; to me it

appears the best grounded Hope; Hope of the Future,

built on Experience of the Past.

The same thought is repeated in a letter to William Strahan, followed,

however, by the dig which he rarely failed to give to his Tory friend,

"Straney," when he had the chance:

God has been very good to you, from whence I think you

may be _assured_ that he loves you, and that he will

take at least as good care of your future Happiness as

he has done of your present. What Assurance of the

_Future_ can be better founded than that which is built

on Experience of the _Past_? Thank me for giving you

this Hint, by the Help of which you may die as

chearfully as you live. If you had Christian Faith,

_quantum suff._, this might not be necessary; but as

matters are it may be of Use.

This hopeful outlook continued until the end. In a letter to his "dear old

friend," George Whatley, which was written about five years before the

writer's death, he adds a resource borrowed from his scientific knowledge

to the other resources of his tranquil optimism.

You see [he said] I have some reason to wish, that, in

a future State, I may not only be _as well as I was_,

but a little better. And I hope it; for I, too, with

your Poet, _trust in God_. And when I observe, that

there is great Frugality, as well as Wisdom, in his

Works, since he has been evidently sparing both of

Labour and Materials; for by the various wonderful

Inventions of Propagation, he has provided for the

continual peopling his World with Plants and Animals,

without being at the Trouble of repeated new Creations;

and by the natural Reduction of compound Substances to

their original Elements, capable of being employ'd in

new Compositions, he has prevented the Necessity of

creating new Matter; so that the Earth, Water, Air, and

perhaps Fire, which being compounded form Wood, do,

when the Wood is dissolved, return, and again become

Air, Earth, Fire, and Water; I say that, when I see

nothing annihilated, and not even a Drop of Water

wasted, I cannot suspect the Annihilation of Souls, or

believe, that he will suffer the daily Waste of

Millions of Minds ready made that now exist, and put

himself to the continual Trouble of making new ones.

Thus finding myself to exist in the World, I believe I

shall, in some Shape or other, always exist.

In a letter to M. Montaudouin in 1779, in reply to one from that friend

applying to him the prayer of Horace for Augustus, he remarked: "Tho' the

Form is heathen, there is good Christian Spirit in it, and I feel myself

very well disposed to be content with this World, which I have found

hitherto a tolerable good one, & to wait for Heaven (which will not be the

worse for keeping) as long as God pleases." But later on, when seven more

years of waning strength had passed, he wrote to his friend Jonathan

Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph's:

I still have Enjoyment in the Company of my Friends;

and, being easy in my Circumstances, have many Reasons

to like living. But the Course of Nature must soon put

a period to my present Mode of Existence. This I shall

submit to with less Regret, as, having seen during a

long Life a good deal of this World, I feel a growing

Curiosity to be acquainted with some other; and can

chearfully, with filial Confidence, resign my Spirit to

the conduct of that great and good Parent of Mankind,

who created it, and who has so graciously protected and

prospered me from my Birth to the present Hour.

At times, his unfailing humor or graceful fancy even plays lambently over

the same stern prospect. In a letter to Mrs. Hewson, written four years

before his death, he mentions cards among his amusements, and then adds:

I have indeed now and then a little compunction in

reflecting that I spend time so idly; but another

reflection comes to relieve me, whispering, "_You know

that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such

a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole

eternity before you?_" So, being easily convinced, and,

like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small

reason, when it is in favour of doing what I have a

mind to do, I shuffle the cards again and begin another

game.

"We were long fellow labourers in the best of all works, the work of

Peace," he wrote to David Hartley, when the writer was on the point of

returning to America from France. "I leave you still in the field, but

having finished my day's task, I am going home _to go to bed_! Wish me a

good night's rest, as I do you a pleasant evening." This was but another

way of expressing the thought of an earlier letter of his to George

Whatley, "I look upon Death to be as necessary to our Constitution as

Sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the Morning."

Your letter [he said to another friend, Thomas Jordan]

reminds me of many happy days we have passed together,

and the dear friends with whom we passed them; some of

whom, alas! have left us, and we must regret their

loss, although our Hawkesworth (the compiler of the

South Sea discoveries of Capt. Cook) is become an

_Adventurer_ in more happy regions; and our Stanley

(the eminent musician and composer) gone, "where only

his own _harmony_ can be exceeded."

Many of these letters, so full of peace and unflinching courage, it should

be recollected, were written during hours of physical debility or grievous

pain.

Every sheet of water takes the hue of the sky above it, and intermixed with

these observations of Franklin, which were themselves, to say the least,

fully as much the natural fruit of a remarkably equable and sanguine

temperament as of religious confidence, are other observations of his upon

religious subjects which were deeply colored by his practical genius,

tolerant disposition and shrewd insight into the imperfections of human

institutions and the shortcomings of human character. With the purely

theological and sectarian side of Religion he had no sympathy whatever. It

was a source of regret to him that, at a time in his boyhood, when he was

consuming books as insatiably as the human lungs consume oxygen, he should

have read most of the treatises "in polemic divinity," of which his

father's little library chiefly consisted. In a letter to Strahan, when he

was in his thirty-ninth year, he said that he had long wanted a judicious

friend in London to send him from time to time such new pamphlets as were

worth reading on any subject, "religious controversy excepted." To Richard

Price he imparted his belief that religious tests were invented not so much

to secure Religion itself as its emoluments, and that, if Christian

preachers had continued to teach as Christ and His Apostles did, without

salaries, and as the Quakers did even in his day, such tests would never

have existed. "When a Religion is good," he asserted, "I conceive that it

will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not

take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the

help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad

one." A favorite saying of his was the saying of Richard Steele that the

difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England is that the

one pretends to be infallible and the other to be never in the wrong.

"Orthodoxy is my doxy and Heterodoxy your doxy," is a saying which has been

attributed to him as his own. His heart went out at once to the Dunkers,

when Michael Welfare, one of the founders of that sect, gave, as his reason

for its unwillingness to publish the articles of its belief, the fact that

it was not satisfied that this belief would not undergo some future changes

for the better with further light from Heaven.

This modesty in a sect [he remarks in the

_Autobiography_] is perhaps a singular instance in the

history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself

in possession of all truth, and that those who differ

are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy

weather, those at some distance before him on the road

he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind

him, and also the people in the fields on each side,

but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as

much in the fog as any of them.

The great meeting-house built at Philadelphia, when George Whitefield had

worked its people into a state of religious ecstasy by his evangelistic

appeals, and the circumstances, under which Franklin was elected to fill a

vacancy among the Trustees, appointed to hold this building, were two

things of which he speaks with obvious pleasure in the _Autobiography_. The

design in erecting the edifice, he declares, was not to accommodate any

particular sect but the inhabitants of Philadelphia in general, "so that

even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach

Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service." The Trustees

to hold this building were each the member of some Protestant sect. In

process of time, the Moravian died, and then there was opposition to the

election of any other Moravian as his successor. "The difficulty then was,"

Franklin tells us, "how to avoid having two of some other sect, by means of

the new choice.

"Several persons were named, and for that reason not agreed to. At length

one mention'd me, with the observation that I was merely an honest man, and

of no sect at all, which prevail'd with them to chuse me."

The manner in which Franklin came to occupy this position of sectarian

detachment is also set forth in the _Autobiography_. On his father's side,

he was descended from sturdy pietists, to whom the difference between one

sect and another did not mean merely polemical warmth, as in Franklin's

time, but the heat of the stake. In the reign of Bloody Mary, Franklin's

great-great-grandfather kept his English Bible open and suspended by tapes,

under the concealing cover of a joint-stool, and, when he inverted the

stool to read from the pages of the book to his family, one of his children

stood at the door to give timely warning of the approach of the dreaded

apparitor. In the reign of Charles the Second, the religious scruples of

Franklin's father and his Uncle Benjamin, before they crossed the sea to

Boston, had been strong enough to induce them to desert the soft lap of the

Church of England for the harried conventicles of the despised and

persecuted Non-Conformists. To the earlier Franklins Religion meant either

all or much that it meant to men in the ages when not Calculating Skill,

but, as Emerson tells us, Love and Terror laid the tiles of cathedrals. But

Benjamin Franklin was not a scion of the sixteenth century, nor even of the

seventeenth, but of the searching and skeptical eighteenth. Some of the

dogmas of the creed, in which he was religiously educated by his father,

such as the eternal decrees of God, election, reprobation and the like

appeared to him unintelligible, others doubtful, he declares in the

_Autobiography_. The consequence was that he early absented himself from

the public assemblies of the Presbyterian sect in Philadelphia, Sunday

being his "studying day," though he never was, he says, without some

religious principles.

I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the

Deity; that he made the world, and govern'd it by his

Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was

the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and

that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded,

either here or hereafter. These I esteem'd the

essentials of every religion; and, being to be found in

all the religions we had in our country, I respected

them all, tho' with different degrees of respect, as I

found them more or less mix'd with other articles,

which, without any tendency to inspire, promote, or

confirm morality, serv'd principally to divide us, and

make us unfriendly to one another.

And then he goes on to inform us that, as Pennsylvania increased in people,

and new places of worship were continually wanted, and were generally

erected by voluntary contributions, his mite for such purposes, whatever

might be the sect, was never refused. This impartial attitude towards the

different religious sects he maintained in every particular throughout his

life, and from his point of view he had no reason to be dissatisfied with

the result, if we may believe John Adams, who tells us: "The Catholics

thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of

them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends

believed him a wet Quaker." "Mr. Franklin had no--" was as far as Adams

himself got in stating his own personal opinion about Franklin's religious

views. To have been regarded as an adherent of every sect was a compliment

that Franklin would have esteemed as second only to the declaration that he

was merely an honest man and of no sect at all. It is certainly one of the

most amusing facts narrated in the _Autobiography_ that such a man, only a

few years after religious bigotry had compelled him to fly from New

England, the land for which Poor Richard, on one occasion, safely predicted

a year of "_dry_ Fish and _dry_ Doctrine," should have been invited by

Keimer, the knavish eccentric of the _Autobiography_, to become "his

colleague in a project he had of setting up a new sect."

George Whitefield appears to have come nearer than anyone else to the honor

of reducing Franklin to a definite religious status. For this celebrated

man he seems to have felt an even warmer regard than that which he usually

entertained for every clergyman who was a faithful exponent of sound

morals. He begins one of his letters to his brother, John Franklin, with a

reference to Whitefield, and then he laconically adds: "He is a good Man

and I love him." In the _Autobiography_ he certifies that, in his opinion,

Whitefield was in all his conduct "a perfectly _honest man_." But even

Whitefield's call to the unconverted, which awakened the conscience of

Philadelphia to such a degree "that one could not walk thro' the town in an

evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street,"

failed to bring Franklin within the great preacher's fold. "He us'd,

indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction

of believing that his prayers were heard. Ours was a mere civil friendship,

sincere on both sides, and lasted to his death." These are the statements

of the _Autobiography_. And a mere civil friendship Franklin was inflexibly

determined to keep it; for we learn from the same source that, when

Whitefield answered an invitation to Franklin's house by saying that, if

Franklin made that kind offer for Christ's sake, he would not miss of a

reward, the reply promptly came back: "_Don't let me be mistaken; it was

not for Christ's sake, but for your sake._" "One of our common

acquaintance," says Franklin, "jocosely remark'd, that, knowing it to be

the custom of the saints, when they received any favour, to shift the

burden of the obligation from off their own shoulders, and place it in

heaven, I had contriv'd to fix it on earth." It may truly be said, however,

that nothing is recorded of the persuasive eloquence of Whitefield more

amazing than the fact that it once swept Franklin for a moment off the feet

on which he stood so firmly. He had made up his mind not to contribute to

one of Whitefield's charitable projects which did not meet with his

approval--but let AEsop tell the story in his own characteristic way:

I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in

the course of which I perceived he intended to finish

with a collection, and I silently resolved he should

get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of

copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five

pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften,

and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of

his oratory made me asham'd of that, and determin'd me

to give the silver; and he finish'd so admirably, that

I empty'd my pocket wholly into the collector's dish,

gold and all.

But Franklin was not long in recovering his equipoise and in again

wondering why Whitefield's auditors should so admire and respect him

notwithstanding "his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were

naturally _half beasts and half devils_." Whitefield, he thought, made a

great mistake in publishing his sermons; for _litera scripta manet_ and

affords a full opportunity for criticism and censure. If the sermons had

not been published, Whitefield's proselytes would have been left, Franklin

believed, to feign for him as great a variety of excellences as their

enthusiastic admiration might wish him to have possessed. A Deist, if

anything, Franklin was when Whitefield first came to Philadelphia, and a

Deist, if anything, he was when Whitefield left it for the last time. When

the latter wrote in his _Journal, "M. B. was a deist, I had almost said an

atheist_," Franklin, indisposed to be deprived of all religious standing,

dryly commented: "That is _chalk_, I had almost said _charcoal_." A man, he

tells us in the _Autobiography_, is sometimes more generous when he has but

a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being

thought to have but little, and it is possible that religious faith may

sometimes be influenced by the same kind of sensitiveness. The truth of the

matter was that as respects theological tenets and sectarian distinctions

Franklin was an incurable heretic, if such a term is appropriate to the

listless indifference to all dogmas and sects rarely broken except by some

merry jest or gentle parable, like his Parable against Persecution or his

Parable of Brotherly Love, with which he regarded every sour fermentation

of the _odium theologicum_. When he heard that a New Englander, John

Thayer, had become a Catholic, the worst that he could find it in his heart

to say was: "Our ancestors from Catholic became first Church-of-England

men, and then refined into Presbyterians. To change now from

Presbyterianism to Popery seems to me refining backwards, from white sugar

to brown." In commenting in a letter to Elizabeth Partridge, formerly

Hubbard, a year or so before his own death on the death of a friend of

theirs, he uses these words:

You tell me our poor Friend Ben Kent is gone; I hope to

the Regions of the Blessed, or at least to some Place

where Souls are prepared for those Regions. I found my

Hope on this, that tho' not so orthodox as you and I,

he was an honest Man, and had his Virtues. If he had

any Hypocrisy it was of that inverted kind, with which

a Man is not so bad as he seems to be. And with regard

to future Bliss I cannot help imagining, that

Multitudes of the zealously Orthodox of different

Sects, who at the last Day may flock together, in hopes

of seeing (mutilated) damn'd, will be disappointed, and

oblig'd to rest content with their own Salvation.

Franklin's Kingdom of Heaven was one into which there was such an abundant

entrance that even his poor friend, Ben Kent, could hope to arrive there

thoroughly disinfected after a brief quarantine on the road.[7] But it is

in his _Conte_ that the spirit of religious charity, by which this letter

is animated, is given the sparkling, graceful form with which his fancy

readily clothed its creations when form and finish were what the

workmanship of the occasion required. Montresor who is very sick, tells his

cure that he has had a vision during the night which has set his mind

entirely at rest as to his future. "What was your vision?" said the good

priest. "I was," replied Montresor, "at the gate of Paradise, with a crowd

of people who wished to enter. And St. Peter asked each one what his

religion was. One answered, 'I am a Roman Catholic.' 'Ah, well,' said St.

Peter, 'enter, and take your place there among the Catholics.' Another

said, that he belonged to the Anglican Church. 'Ah, well,' said St. Peter,

'enter and take your place there among the Anglicans.' Another said that he

was a Quaker. 'Enter,' said St. Peter, 'and take your place among the

Quakers.' Finally, my turn being come, he asked me what my religion was.

'Alas!' replied I, 'unfortunately poor Jacques Montresor has none.' 'That

is a pity,' said the Saint, 'I do not know where to place you; but enter

all the same; and place yourself where you can.'"

Perhaps, however, in none of Franklin's writings is his mental attitude

towards religious sects and their varied creeds and organizations disclosed

with such bland _insouciance_ and delicate raillery as in his letter to

Mason Weems and Edward Gantt. Weems was the famous parson Weems whose

legendary story of the cherry tree and the hatchet made for many years such

a sublime _enfant terrible_ of Washington, and Gantt was a native of

Maryland who was destined in the course of time to become a chaplain of the

United States Senate. In this letter, after acknowledging a letter from

Weems and Gantt telling him that the Archbishop of Canterbury would not

permit them to be ordained, unless they took the oath of allegiance, he

says that he had obtained an opinion from a clergyman of his acquaintance

in Paris that they could not be ordained there, or that, if they were, they

would be required to vow obedience to the Archbishop of Paris. He next

inquired of the Pope's Nuncio whether they might not be ordained by the

Catholic Bishop in America, but received the answer that the thing was

impossible unless the gentlemen became Catholics. Then, after a deprecatory

statement that the affair was one of which he knew very little, and that he

might therefore ask questions or propose means that were improper or

impracticable, he pointedly adds: "But what is the necessity of your being

connected with the Church of England? Would it not be as well, if you were

of the Church of Ireland?" The religion was the same, though there was a

different set of Bishops and Archbishops and perhaps the Bishop of Derry,

who was a man of liberal sentiments, might give them orders as of the Irish

Church. If both Britain and Ireland refused them (and he was not sure that

the Bishops of Denmark or Sweden would ordain them unless they became

Lutherans), then, in his humble opinion, next to becoming Presbyterians,

the Episcopal Clergy of America could not do better than follow the example

of the first Clergy of Scotland, who, when a similar difficulty arose,

assembled in the Cathedral, and the Mitre, Crosier and Robes of a Bishop

being laid upon the Altar, 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._" If

the British Isles were sunk in the sea, he continued (and the surface of

the Globe had suffered greater changes), his correspondents would probably

take some such method as this, and persistence in the denial of ordination

to them by the English Church came to the same thing. A hundred years

later, when people were more enlightened, it would 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 until they had

made a voyage of six thousand miles out and home to ask leave of a cross

old gentleman at Canterbury who seemed, by the account of his

correspondents, to have as little regard for the souls of the People of

Maryland as King William's Attorney-General Seymour had for those of the

People of Virginia, when, in reply to the reminder of the Reverend

Commissary Blair of William and Mary College that the latter had souls to

be saved as well as the People of England, he exclaimed: "_Souls!_ damn

your Souls. Make Tobacco."

Here we have Franklin absolutely _in puris naturalibus_ as respects the

sacerdotal side of Religion, lavishing upon his correspondents in a single

letter a series of half-serious, half-mocking sentiments flavored with some

of his best intellectual qualities, and doubtless leaving them in a teasing

state of uncertainty as to whether he intended to ridicule them or not. In

the light of such a letter as this, the reader will hardly be surprised to

learn that he did not quit the world until he had put on record his high

opinion of heretics. After asking Benjamin Vaughan in one of his letters

about a year and a half before his death, to remember him affectionately to

the "honest" heretic, Doctor Priestley, he said:

I do not call him _honest_ by way of distinction; for I

think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous

men. They have the virtue of fortitude, or they would

not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford

to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that

would give advantage to their many enemies; and they

have not, like orthodox sinners, such a number of

friends to excuse or justify them.

Holding these views about heretics, it is natural that Franklin should at

times have stigmatized religious bigotry as it deserved. In his _Remarks on

a Late Protest_, when he was being assailed for one of the most creditable

acts of his life, his unsparing denunciation of the murder of hapless

Indians by the Paxton Boys, he had a fearless word to say about "those

religious Bigots, who are of all Savages the most brutish." And it would be

difficult to find a terser or more graphic picture of religious discord

than this in one of his letters to Jane Mecom:

Each party abuses the other; the profane and the

infidel believe both sides, and enjoy the fray; the

reputation of religion in general suffers, and its

enemies are ready to say, not what was said in the

primitive times, Behold how these Christians love one

another,--but, Mark how these Christians hate one

another! Indeed, when religious people quarrel about

religion or hungry people about their victuals, it

looks as if they had not much of either among them.

Not only did Franklin have no sympathy with sects and their jarring

pretensions but he had little patience with either doctrinal theology or

ecclesiastical rites and forms of any sort. Even after he decided to keep

away from public worship on Sundays, he still retained [he said], a sense

of its utility, when rightly conducted, and continued to pay regularly his

annual subscription to the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia which he had

attended. Later, he was induced by its pastor to sit now and then under his

ministrations; once he states, as if with a slight elevation of the

eyebrows, for five Sundays successively, but it all proved unedifying,

since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced; the aim of

the preacher seeming to be rather to make them good Presbyterians than good

citizens. At length the devout man took for his text the following verse

from the fourth chapter of the Philippians: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever

things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely or of good report, if there be

any virtue, or any praise, think on these things." Now, thought Franklin,

in a sermon on such a text we cannot miss of having some of the "morality"

which was to him the entire meat of religion. But the text, promising as it

was, had been subjected to such merciless dessication that it resolved

itself into five points only "as meant by the apostle, viz.: 1. Keeping

holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy Scriptures. 3.

Attending duly the publick worship. 4. Partaking of the Sacrament. 5.

Paying a due respect to God's ministers." Franklin was disgusted, gave this

preacher up entirely, and returned to the use of the _Articles of Belief

and Acts of Religion_ which he had previously composed for his own private

devotions. Subsequently, however, he was again enticed to church by the

arrival in Philadelphia from Ireland of a young Presbyterian minister,

named Hemphill, who preached good works rather than dogma in excellent

discourses, apparently extemporaneous, and set off with an attractive

voice. This minister was soon formally arraigned for heterodoxy by the old

orthodox clergy who were in the habit of paying more attention to

Presbyterian doctrine than Franklin was, and found a powerful champion in

Franklin, who, seeing that Hemphill, while an "elegant preacher," was, for

reasons that afterwards became only too patent, a poor writer, wrote

several pamphlets and an article in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ in his

behalf. Unfortunately, when the war of words was at its height, Hemphill,

who afterwards confessed to Franklin that none of the sermons that he

preached were of his own composition, was proved to have purloined a part,

at any rate, of one of his sermons from Dr. Foster, of whom Pope had

written,

"Let modest Foster, if he will excel

Ten metropolitans in preaching well."

The Synod found against him, but so agreeable to Franklin was the all

too-brief taste that he had enjoyed of good works that he adhered to

Hemphill to the last. "I stuck by him, however," he says, "as I rather

approv'd his giving us good sermons compos'd by others, than bad ones of

his own manufacture, tho' the latter was the practice of our common

teachers"; among whom he doubtless included the dreary shepherd who had

made so little out of the verse in the fourth chapter of Philippians.

Everything found its practical level in that mind at last. It might be

added that Franklin's stand on this occasion was but in keeping with a

final word of counsel which he wrote many years afterwards to his daughter

Sally, when he was descending the Delaware on his way to England. After

enjoining upon her especial attention her Book of Common Prayer, he

continued: "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."

After the Hemphill disappointment, he ceased to attend the church in which

his _protege_ had come to grief, though he continued to subscribe to the

support of its minister for many years. He took a pew in an Episcopal

Church, Christ Church, and here he was careful that his family should

regularly worship every Sunday, notwithstanding the fact that he was too

busy again with his studies on that day to worship there himself, or placed

too much confidence in his _Art of Virtue and Articles of Belief and Acts

of Religion_ to feel the need for doing so. Here too his daughter and his

son Francis who died in childhood were baptized, and here his wife and

himself were buried. While he rarely attended the services at this church,

he was one of its mainstays in every pecuniary sense.

In more than one particular, Franklin was lax in France where he was only

liberal in America. At any rate he was even less of a Sabbatarian in the

former country than he was in the latter. As respects observance of the

Sabbath, he fully fell in with French usages and was in the habit of

setting apart the day as a day for attending the play or opera,

entertaining his friends, or amusing himself with chess or cards. One of

Poor Richard's maxim's was: "Work as if you were to live a hundred years,

pray as if you were to die to-morrow," and, while Franklin was not the

person to pray in just that rapt fashion, he seems to have thought rather

better of prayer than of other religious ceremonies. In the letter of

caution to his daughter Sally, from which we have already quoted, he tells

her, "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." He promptly

repelled an intimation of his sister Jane that he was opposed to divine

worship with the statement that, so far from thinking that God was not to

be worshipped, he had composed and written a whole book of devotions for

his own use; meaning his _Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_. This

statement always brings back to us the reply of Charles Sumner, when he was

very sick, and was asked whether he was prepared to die, viz. that he had

read the Old Testament in the Greek version. A glance at the "First

Principles," with which the book begins, would hardly, we fear, have

allayed the fears of Jane. That Franklin should ever, even at the age of

twenty-two, have composed anything in the way of a creed so fanciful, not

to say fantastic, is nothing short of an enormity, even more startlingly

out of harmony with his usually sound and sure-footed intelligence than the

whimsical letter to General Charles Lee, in which, on the eve of the

American Revolution, he advised a return to bows and arrows as efficient

instruments of modern warfare. "I believe," commences the creed, "there is

one supreme, most perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves.

For I believe that Man is not the most perfect Being but one, rather that

as there are many Degrees of Beings his Inferiors, so there are many

Degrees of Beings superior to him." Then, after quite a lengthy preamble,

follows this Confession of Faith:

Therefore I think it seems required of me, and my Duty

as a Man, to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING.

I conceive then, that The INFINITE has created many

beings or Gods, vastly superior to Man, who can better

conceive his Perfections than we, and return him a more

rational and glorious Praise.

As, among Men, the Praise of the Ignorant or of

Children, is not regarded by the ingenious Painter or

Architect, who is rather honour'd and pleas'd with the

approbation of Wise Men & Artists.

It may be that these created Gods are immortal; or it

may be that after many Ages, they are changed, and

others Supply their Places.

Howbeit, I conceive that each of these is exceeding

wise and good, and very powerful; and that Each has

made for himself one glorious Sun, attended with a

beautiful and admirable System of Planets.

It is that particular Wise and Good God, who is the

author and owner of our System, that I propose for the

object of my praise and adoration.

Under the same head of "First Principles," there is a slight flavor of the

_Art of Virtue:_ "Since without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this

World, I firmly believe he delights to see me Virtuous, because he is

pleased when he sees Me Happy."

That one of the sanest, wisest, and most terrene of great men, and a man,

too, who was not supposed in his time to have any very firm belief in the

existence of even one God, should, young as he was, have peopled the

stellar spaces with such a hierarchy, half pantheistic, half feudal as

this, is, we take it, one of the most surprising phenomena in the history

of the human intellect. James Parton surmises that the idea probably

filtered to Franklin, when he was a youth in London, through Dr. Pemberton,

the editor of the third edition of the _Principia_, from a conjecture

thrown out in conversation by Sir Isaac Newton. It reappears in Franklin's

_Arabian Tale_. "Men in general," says Belubel, the Strong, "do not know,

but thou knowest, that in ascending from an elephant to the infinitely

Great, Good, and Wise, there is also a long gradation of beings, who

possess powers and faculties of which thou canst yet have no conception."

The next head in the book of devotions is "Adoration," under which is

arranged a series of liturgical statements, accompanied by a recurrent note

of praise, and preceded by an invocation and the following prelude in the

nature of a stage direction:

Being mindful that before I address the Deity, my soul

ought to be calm and serene, free from Passion and

Perturbation, or otherwise elevated with Rational Joy

and Pleasure, I ought to use a Countenance that

expresses a filial Respect, mixed with a kind of

Smiling, that Signifies inward Joy, and Satisfaction,

and Admiration.[8]

The liturgical statements are followed by another direction that it will

not be improper now to read part of some such book as Ray's _Wisdom of God

in the Creation_, or _Blackmore on the Creation_, or the Archbishop of

Cambray's _Demonstration of the Being of a God_, etc., or else to spend

some minutes in a serious silence contemplating on those subjects. Then

follows another direction calling for Milton's glorious _Hymn to the

Creator_; then still another calling for the reading of some book, or part

of a book, discoursing on, and inciting to, Moral Virtue; then a succession

of resonant supplications, adjuring the aid of the particular Wise and Good

God, who is the author and _owner_ (or subfeudatory) of our System, in

Franklin's efforts to shun certain vices and infirmities, and to practice

certain virtues; all of the vices, infirmities and virtues being set forth

in the most specific terms with the limpidity which marked everything that

Franklin ever wrote, sacred or profane. One of the supplications was that

he might be loyal to his Prince and faithful to his country. This he was

until it became impossible for him to be loyal to both. Another was that he

might avoid lasciviousness. The prayer was not answered; for William

Franklin, on account of whose birth he should have received twenty-one

lashes under the laws of Pennsylvania, was born about two years after it

was framed. Creed and liturgy end with a series of thanks for the benefits

which the author had already received. Both creed and liturgy, we are told

by James Parton, were recorded with the utmost care and elegance in a

little pocket prayer-book, and the liturgy Franklin practiced for many

years. For a large part of his life, he bore his book of devotions and his

book of moral practice about on his person wherever he went, as if they

were amulets to ward off every evil inclination upon his part to yield to

what he calls in the _Autobiography_ "the unremitting attraction of ancient

habits."

It is likewise a fact that, notwithstanding the high opinion that he

expressed to his daughter Sally of the Book of Common Prayer, he undertook

at one time to assist Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Le Despencer in reforming

it. The delicious incongruity of the thing is very much enhanced when we

remember that a part of Sir Francis' religious training for the task

consisted in the circumstance that, in his wilder days, he had been the

Abbot of Medmenham Abbey, which numbered among its godless monks--named the

Franciscans after himself--the Earl of Sandwich, Paul Whitehead, Budd

Doddington and John Wilkes. Over the portals of this infamous retreat was

written "Do what you please," and within it the licentious invitation was

duly carried into practice by perhaps the most graceless group of

blasphemers and libertines that England had ever known. However, when Sir

Francis and Franklin became collaborators, the former had, with advancing

years, apparently reached the conclusion that this world was one where a

decent regard should be paid to something higher than ourselves in

preference to giving ourselves up unreservedly to doing what we please, and

intercourse, bred by the fact that Sir Francis was a Joint

Postmaster-General of Great Britain at the same time that Franklin was

Deputy Postmaster-General for America, led naturally to a co-operative

venture on their part. Of Sir Francis, when the dregs of his life were

settling down into the bottom of the glass, leaving nothing but the better

elements of his existence to be drawn off, Franklin gives us a genial

picture. Speaking of West Wycombe, Sir Francis' country seat, he says: "But

a pleasanter Thing is the kind Countenance, the facetious and very

intelligent Conversation of mine Host, who having been for many Years

engaged in publick Affairs, seen all Parts of Europe, and kept the best

Company in the World, is himself the best existing." High praise this,

indeed, from a man who usually had a social equivalent for whatever he

received from an agreeable host! Franklin took as his share of the revision

the Catechism and the Psalms. Of the Catechism, he retained only two

questions (with the answers), "What is your duty to God?" and "What is your

duty to your neighbor?" The Psalms he very much shortened by omitting the

repetitions (of which he found, he said, in a letter to Granville Sharp,

more than he could have imagined) and the imprecations, which appeared, he

said, in the same letter, not to suit well the Christian doctrine of

forgiveness of injuries and doing good to enemies. As revised by the two

friends, the book was shorn of all references to the Sacraments and to the

divinity of Our Lord, and the commandments in the Catechism, the Nicene and

the Athanasian Creeds, and even the Canticle, "All ye Works of the Lord,"

so close to the heart of nature, were ruthlessly deleted. All of the

Apostle's Creed, too, went, except, to use Franklin's words, "the parts

that are most intelligible and most essential." The _Te Deum_ and the

_Venite_ were also pared down to very small proportions. Some of the other

changes assumed the form of abridgments of the services provided for

Communion, Infant Baptism, Confirmation, the Visitation of the Sick and the

Burial of the Dead. Franklin loved his species too much, we may be sure,

not to approve unqualifiedly the resolution of Sir Francis to omit wholly

"the Commination, and all cursing of mankind." Nor was a man, whose own

happy marriage had begun with such little ceremony, likely to object

strongly to the abbreviation of the service for the solemnization of

Matrimony upon which Sir Francis also decided. In fine, the whole of the

Book of Common Prayer was reduced to nearly one half its original compass.

The preface was written by Franklin. Judging from its terms, the principal

motive of the new version was to do away with the physical inconvenience

and discomfort caused in one way or another by long services. If the

services were abridged, the clergy would be saved a great deal of fatigue,

many pious and devout persons, unable from age or infirmities to remain for

hours in a cold church, would then attend divine worship and be

comfortable, the younger people would probably attend oftener and more

cheerfully, the sick would not find the prayer for the visitation of the

sick such a burden in their weak and distressed state, and persons,

standing around an open grave, could put their hats on again after a much

briefer period of exposure. Other reasons are given for the revision, but

the idea of holding out brevity as a kind of bait to worship is the

dominant one that runs through the Preface. It is written exactly as if

there was no such thing in the world as hallowed religious traditions,

associations or sentiments, deep as Human Love, strong as Death, to which

an almost sacrilegious shock would be given by even moderate innovations.

"The book," Franklin says in his letter to Granville Sharp, "was printed

for Wilkie, in St. Paul's Church Yard, but never much noticed. Some were

given away, very few sold, and I suppose the bulk became waste paper. In

the prayers so much was retrenched that approbation could hardly be

expected." In America, the Abridgment was known as "Franklin's Prayer

Book," and, worthless as it is, in a religious sense, since it became rare,

Franklin's fame has been known to give a single copy of it a pecuniary

value of not less than one thousand dollars. The literary relations of

Franklin to devotion began with a Creed as eccentric as the Oriental notion

that the whole world is upheld by a cow with blue horns and ended with

partial responsibility for a Prayer Book almost as devoid of a true

religious spirit as one of his dissertations on chimneys. He was slow,

however, to renounce a practical aim, when once formed. The abridged Prayer

Book was printed in 1773, and some fourteen years afterwards in a letter to

Alexander Small he expressed his pleasure at hearing that it had met with

the approbation of Small and "good Mrs. Baldwin." "It is not yet, that I

know of," he said, "received in public Practice anywhere; but, as it is

said that Good Motions never die, perhaps in time it may be found useful."

Another incident in the relations of Franklin to Prayer was the suggestion

made by him in the Federal Convention of 1787 that thenceforth prayers,

imploring the assistance of Heaven and its blessing on the deliberations of

the Convention, should be held every morning before the Convention

proceeded to business. "In this Situation of this Assembly, groping, as it

were, in the dark to find Political Truth, and scarce able to distinguish

it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir," he asked, "that we have

not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to

illuminate our Understandings?" The question was a timely one, and was part

of an eloquent and impressive speech, but resulted in nothing more fruitful

than an exclamatory memorandum of Franklin, indignant or humorous we do not

know which, "The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers

unnecessary!"

It is only when insisting upon the charitable and fruitful side of religion

that Franklin has any wholesome or winning message to deliver touching it;

but, when doing this, his utterances are often edifying in the highest

degree. In an early letter to his father, who believed that the son had

imbibed some erroneous opinions with regard to religion, after respectfully

reminding his father that it is no more in a man's power to think than to

look like another, he used these words:

My mother grieves that one of her sons is an Arian,

another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an Arian is, I

cannot say that I very well know. The truth is, I make

such distinctions very little my study. I think vital

religion has always suffered, when orthodoxy is more

regarded than virtue; and the Scriptures assure me,

that at the last day we shall not be examined what we

_thought_, but what we _did_; and our recommendation

will not be, that we said, _Lord! Lord!_ but that we

did good to our fellow creatures. (See Matt. xxv.)

These convictions he was destined to reaffirm over and over again in the

course of his life. They were most elaborately stated in his forty-eighth

year in a letter to Joseph Huey. He had received, he said, much kindness

from men, to whom he would never have any opportunity of making the least

direct return, and numberless mercies from God who was infinitely above

being benefited by our services. Those kindnesses from men he could

therefore only return on their fellow men, and he could only show his

gratitude for these mercies from God by a readiness to help God's other

children and his brethren. For he did not think that thanks and

compliments, though repeated weekly, could discharge our real obligations

to each other and much less those to our Creator. He that for giving a

draught of water to a thirsty person should expect to be paid with a good

plantation, would be modest in his demands compared with those who think

they deserve Heaven for the little good they do on earth. The faith Huey

mentioned, he said, had doubtless its use in the world; but he wished it

were more productive of good works than he had generally seen it; he meant

real good works, works of kindness, charity, mercy and public spirit; not

holiday keeping, sermon reading or hearing, performing church ceremonies,

or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments, despised

even by wise men and much less capable of pleasing the Deity. The worship

of God was a duty; the hearing reading of sermons might be useful, but if

men rested in hearing and praying, as too many did, it was as if a tree

should value itself on being watered and putting forth leaves though it

never produced any fruit.

Your great Master [he continued] tho't much less of

these outward Appearances and Professions than many of

his modern Disciples. He prefer'd the _Doers_ of the

Word, to the meer _Hearers_; the Son that seemingly

refus'd to obey his Father, and yet perform'd his

Commands, to him that profess'd his Readiness, but

neglected the Work, the heretical but charitable

Samaritan, to the uncharitable tho' orthodox Priest and

sanctified Levite; & those who gave Food to the hungry,

Drink to the Thirsty, Raiment to the Naked,

Entertainment to the Stranger, and Relief to the Sick,

tho' they never heard of his Name, he declares shall in

the last Day be accepted, when those who cry Lord!

Lord! who value themselves on their Faith, tho' great

enough to perform Miracles, but have neglected good

Works, shall be rejected.

And then, after a word about the modesty of Christ, he breaks out into

something as much like a puff of anger as anything that his perfect mental

balance would allow; "But now-a-days we have scarce a little Parson, that

does not think it the Duty of every Man within his Reach to sit under his

petty Ministrations." Altogether, the Rev. Mr. Hemphill never stole, and

few clergymen ever composed, a more striking sermon on good works than this

letter. And this was because the doctrines that it preached belonged fully

as much to the province of Human Benevolence as of Religion.

A pretty sermon also was the letter of Franklin to his sister Jane on

Faith, Hope and Charity. After quoting a homely acrostic, in which his

uncle Benjamin, who, humble as his place on Parnassus was, fumbled poetry

with distinctly better success than the nephew, had advised Jane to "raise

_faith_ and _hope_ three stories higher," he went on to read her a lecture

which is too closely knit to admit of compression:

You are to understand, then, that _faith_, _hope_, and

_charity_ have been called the three steps of Jacob's

ladder, reaching from earth to heaven; our author calls

them _stories_, likening religion to a building, and

these are the three stories of the Christian edifice.

Thus improvement in religion is called _building up_

and _edification_. _Faith_ is then the ground floor,

_hope_ is up one pair of stairs. My dear beloved Jenny,

don't delight so much to dwell in those lower rooms,

but get as fast as you can into the garret, for in

truth the best room in the house is _charity_. For my

part, I wish the house was turned upside down; 'tis so

difficult (when one is fat) to go up stairs; and not

only so, but I imagine _hope_ and _faith_ may be more

firmly built upon _charity_, than _charity_ upon

_faith_ and _hope_. However that may be, I think it the

better reading to say--

"Raise faith and hope one story higher."

Correct it boldly, and I'll support the alteration;

for, when you are up two stories already, if you raise

your building three stories higher you will make five

in all, which is two more than there should be, you

expose your upper rooms more to the winds and storms;

and, besides, I am afraid the foundation will hardly

bear them, unless indeed you build with such light

stuff as straw and stubble, and that, you know, won't

stand fire. Again, where the author says,

"Kindness of heart by words express,"

strike out _words_ and put in _deeds_. The world is too

full of compliments already. They are the rank growth

of every soil, and choak the good plants of

benevolence, and beneficence; nor do I pretend to be

the first in this comparison of words and actions to

plants; you may remember an ancient poet, whose works

we have all studied and copied at school long ago.

"A man of words and not of deeds

Is like a garden full of weeds."

'Tis a pity that good works, among some sorts of

people, are so little valued, and good words admired in

their stead: I mean seemingly pious discourses, instead

of humane benevolent actions.

To the Rev. Thomas Coombe Franklin expressed the opinion that, unless

pulpit eloquence turned men to righteousness, the preacher or the priest

was not merely sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, which were innocent

things, but rather like the cunning man in the Old Baily who conjured and

told fools their fortunes to cheat them out of their money.

The general spirit of these various utterances of Franklin on vital

religion were sarcastically condensed in a remark of Poor Richard: "Serving

God is doing good to Man, but praying is thought an easier serving, and

therefore most generally chosen."

In forming an accurate conception of the influences by which the mind of

Franklin was brought into its posture of antagonism or indifference to the

doctrinal side of religion, it is necessary to take into consideration not

only the innate attributes of his intellect and character but also the

external pressure to which his opinions were subjected in his early life.

It was the religious intolerance and proscriptive spirit of the Puritan

society, in which he was born and reared, which drove him, first, into

dissent, and then, into disbelief. Borne the day he was born, if tradition

may be believed, though the ground was covered with snow, to the Old South

Church in Boston, and baptized there, so that he might escape every chance

of dying an unregenerate and doomed infant, he grew into boyhood to find

himself surrounded by conditions which tended to either reduce the free

impulses of his nature to supine or sullen submission or to force him into

active revolt. It is hard to suppress a smile when he tells us in the

_Autobiography_ that his father, who doubtless knew the difference between

an Arian and an Arminian even better than his mother, intended to devote

him as the tithe of his sons to the service of the Church. He smiles

himself when he adds with a trace of his former commercial calling that his

uncle Benjamin approved of the idea and proposed to give him all his

shorthand volumes of sermons "as a stock" Franklin supposed, "to set up

with." The intention of Josiah was soon abandoned, and Benjamin became the

apprentice of his brother James, the owner and publisher of the Boston

_Courant_, the fourth newspaper published in America. During the course of

this apprenticeship, first, as a contributor to the _Courant_, under the

_nom de plume_ of Silence Dogood, and, then, as its publisher in the place

of his brother, who had incurred the censure of the Puritan Lord Brethren,

he was drawn into the bitter attack made by it upon the religious

intolerance and narrowness of the times. During its career, the paper plied

the ruling dignitaries of the Boston of that day with so many clever little

pasquinades that the Rev. Increase Mather was compelled to signify to the

printer that he would have no more of their wicked Courants.

I that have known what New England was from the

Beginning [he said] can not but be troubled to see the

Degeneracy of this Place. I can well remember when the

Civil Government would have taken an effectual Course

to suppress such a _Cursed Libel!_ which if it be not

done I am afraid that some _Awful Judgment_ will come

upon this Land, and the _Wrath of God will arise, and

there will be no Remedy_.

Undaunted, the wicked _Courant_ took pains to let the public know that,

while the angry minister was no longer one of its subscribers, he sent his

grandson for the paper every week, and by paying a higher price for it in

that way was a more valuable patron than ever. The indignation of another

writer, supposed to be Cotton Mather, lashed itself into such fury that it

seemed as if the vile sheet would be buried beneath a pyramid of

vituperative words. "The _Courant_," he declared, was "a notorious,

scandalous" newspaper, "full freighted with nonsense, unmannerliness,

railery, prophaneness, immorality, arrogance, calumnies, lies,

contradictions, and what not, all tending to quarrels and divisions, and to

debauch and corrupt the minds and manners of New England." For a time, the

Church was too much for the scoffers. James Franklin was not haled for his

sins before the Judgment seat of God, as Increase Mather said he might be,

speedily, though a young man, but he was, as we shall hereafter see more in

detail, reduced to such a plight by the hand of civil authority that he had

to turn over the management of the _Courant_ to Benjamin, whose tart wit

and literary skill made it more of a cursed libel than ever to arbitrary

power and clerical bigotry.

The daring state of license, into which the sprightly boy fell, during his

connection with the _Courant_, is clearly revealed in the letter

contributed by Silence Dogood to it on the subject of Harvard College. In

this letter, she tells how the greater part of the rout that left Harvard

College "went along a large beaten Path, which led to a Temple at the

further End of the Plain, call'd, _The Temple of Theology_." "The Business

of those who were employed in this Temple being laborious and painful, I

wonder'd exceedingly," she said, "to see so many go towards it; but while I

was pondering this Matter in my Mind, I spy'd _Pecunia_ behind a Curtain,

beckoning to them with her Hand, which Sight immediately satisfy'd me for

whose Sake it was, that a great Part of them (I will not say all) travel'd

that Road." While the _Courant_ was running its lively course, young

Franklin was shunning church on Sundays, reading Shaftesbury and Anthony

Collins, and drifting further and further away from all the fixed

shore-lights of religious faith.

Then came the hegira, which ended, as all the world knows, at Philadelphia.

The first place curiously enough, in which the fugitive slept after

reaching that city, was the great Quaker Meeting House, whither he had been

swept by the concourse of clean-dressed people, that he had seen walking

towards it, when he was sauntering aimlessly about the streets of his new

home, shortly after his arrival. "I sat down among them," he says in the

_Autobiography_, "and, after looking round awhile and hearing nothing said,

being very drowsy thro' labour and want of rest the preceding night, I fell

fast asleep, and continu'd so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind

enough to rouse me." The halcyon calm of this meeting offers a strange

enough contrast to the "disputatious turn" which had been engendered in him

as he tells us by his father's "books of dispute about religion" before he

left Boston.

The state of mind with respect to religion that he brought with him to

Philadelphia is thus described by him in the _Autobiography_:

My parents had early given me religious impressions,

and brought me through my childhood piously in the

Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen, when, after

doubting by turns of several points, as I found them

disputed in the different books I read, I began to

doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism

fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance

of sermons preached at Boyle's lectures. It happened

that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to

what was intended by them; for the arguments of the

Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me

much stronger than the refutations.

Before the inevitable reaction set in, we obtain from the _Autobiography_ a

few other items of religious or semi-religious interest. A passing

reference has already been made to Keimer's invitation to Franklin to unite

with him in founding another sect. He had been so often trepanned by

Franklin's Socratic method of argument that he had finally come to

entertain a great respect for it. He was to preach the doctrines, and his

co-laborer was to confound all opponents. As he was in the habit of wearing

his beard at full length, because somewhere in the Mosaic Law it was said,

"Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard"; and was also in the habit of

keeping the seventh day as his Sabbath, he insisted that these two habits

of his should be enjoined as essential points of discipline upon the

adherents of the new creed. Franklin agreed to acquiesce in this upon the

condition that Keimer would confine himself to a vegetable diet. The latter

consented, and, though a great glutton, ate no animal food for three

months. During this period, their victuals were dressed and brought to them

by a woman in their neighborhood who had been given by Franklin a list of

forty dishes, to be prepared for them at different times, in all which

there was neither fish, flesh nor fowl. "The whim," he declared, "suited me

the better at this time from the cheapness of it, not costing us above

eighteen pence sterling each per week." At the termination of three months,

however, Keimer could live up to his Pythagorean vow no longer, invited two

of his women friends and Franklin to dine with him, and ordered a roast pig

for the occasion. Unfortunately for his guests, the pig was placed a little

prematurely upon the table, and was all consumed by him before they

arrived. With the disappearance of the pig, the new sect came to an end

too.

As sharp as the contrast between Franklin's spirit and the dove-like peace

that brooded over the Great Quaker Meeting House, was the contrast between

it and that of the self-devoted nun, whom he was once permitted to visit in

the garret, in which she had immured herself, of his lodging house in Duke

Street, London, opposite the Romish Chapel. As there was no nunnery in

England, she had resolved to lead the life of a nun as nearly as possible

under the circumstances. Accordingly she had donated all her estate to

charitable uses, reserving only twelve pounds a year to live on, and out of

this sum she still gave a great deal to charity, subsisting herself on

water gruel only, and using no fire but to boil it. For many years, she had

been allowed to live in her garret free of charge by successive Catholic

tenants of the house, as they deemed it a blessing to have her there. A

priest visited her to confess her every day. When asked how she could

possibly find so much employment for a confessor, she replied: "Oh! It is

impossible to avoid _vain thoughts_." Franklin found her cheerful and

polite and of pleasant conversation. Her room was clean, but had no other

furniture than a mattress, a table with a crucifix and book, a stool, which

she gave him to sit on, and a picture over the chimney of Saint Veronica,

displaying her handkerchief, with the miraculous figure of Christ's

bleeding face on it, which she explained to Franklin, of all the persons in

the world, with great seriousness. She looked pale, but was never sick. "I

give it," says Franklin in the _Autobiography_, "as another instance on how

small an income, life and health may be supported." At no period of his

existence, was he less likely to be in sympathy with the ascetic side of

religion than at this. Indeed, while in London at this time, believing that

some of the reasonings of Wollaston's _Religion of Nature_, which he was

engaged in composing at Palmer's Printing House in Bartholomew Close, where

he was employed as a printer, were not well founded, he wrote _A

Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_, and dedicated it

to his rapscallion friend, James Ralph, whose own ideas about Liberty may

be inferred from the fact that he had deserted his family in Philadelphia

to seek his fortune in England. This pamphlet Franklin afterwards came to

regard as one of the _errata_ of his life, and, of the one hundred copies

of it that were printed, he then burnt all that he could lay his hands on

except one with marginal notes by Lyons, the author of _The Infallibility

of Human Judgment_. The argument of the pamphlet, as Franklin states it in

the _Autobiography_, was that, as both virtue and vice owed their origin to

an infinitely wise, good and powerful God, "nothing could possibly be wrong

in the world," and vice and virtue were empty distinctions. Franklin's

efforts to suppress the piece were, naturally enough, ineffectual, for

there was an inextinguishable spark of vitality in almost everything that

he ever wrote.

These utterances make it apparent enough that the religious character of

Franklin was subject to too many serious limitations to justify even early

American patriotism in holding him up as an exemplar of religious

orthodoxy, although our incredulity is not necessarily overtaxed by the

statement of Parson Weems that, when Franklin was on his death-bed, he had

a picture of Christ on the Cross placed in such a situation that he could

conveniently rest his eyes upon it, and declared: "That's the picture of

Him who came into the world to teach men to love one another." This kind of

a teacher, divine or human, could not fail to awaken in him something as

nearly akin to religious reverence as his nature was capable of

entertaining. But his mental and moral constitution was one to which it was

impossible that the supernatural or miraculous element in Religion could

address a persuasive appeal. "In the Affairs of this World, Men are saved,

not by Faith, but by Want of it," said Poor Richard, and it was with the

affairs of this World that Franklin was exclusively concerned. When he

visited the recluse in her Duke Street garret, it was not the crucifix and

book, nor the picture over the chimney of Saint Veronica and her

handkerchief that arrested his attention, nor was it the self-sacrificing

fidelity of the lonely figure under harsh restrictions to a pure and

unselfish purpose. It was rather the small income, with its salutary lesson

of frugality for the struggling world outside, on which she contrived to

support life and health. If he deemed a set of sectarian principles to be

whimsical, as he did some of those professed by the Quakers, he humored

them in the spirit of his wife who, he reminded his daughter in one of his

letters, was in the habit of saying: "_If People can be pleased with small

Matters, it is a Pity but they should have them._" Few men have ever been

more familiar with the Scriptures than he. Some of his happiest

illustrations were derived from its pictured narratives and rich imagery,

but the idea that God had revealed His purposes to His children in its

pages was one not congenial with his sober and inquisitive mental outlook;

and equally uncongenial was the idea, which of all others has exercised the

profoundest degree of religious influence upon the human heart, that

Christ, the only begotten son of our Lord, was sent into the world to

redeem us from our sins with His most precious blood. Even his belief in

the existence of a superintending Providence and a system of rewards and

punishments here or hereafter for our moral conduct was a more or less

vague, floating belief, such as few thoroughly wise, well-balanced and

fair-minded men, who have given any real thought to the universe, in which

they lived, have ever failed to form to a greater or less degree. In a

word, of that real, vital religion, which vivifies even the common, dull

details of our daily lives, and irradiates with cheerful hope even the dark

abyss, to which our feet are hourly tending, which purifies our hearts,

refines our natures, quickens our sympathies, exalts our ideals, and is

capable unassisted of inspiring even the humblest life with a subdued but

noble enthusiasm, equal to all the shocks of existence--of this religion

Franklin had none, or next to none. He went about the alteration of the

Book of Common Prayer exactly as if he were framing a constitution for the

Albany Congress or for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. That the

alterations were to be shaped by any but purely practical considerations,

that deep religious feeling has unreasoning reservations which intuitively

resent the mere suggestion of change, he does not seem to have realized at

all. Religion to him was like any other apparatus, essential to the

well-being of organized society, a thing to be fashioned and adapted to

its uses without reference to anything but the ordinary principles of

utility. "If men are so wicked as we now see them _with religion_, what

would they be _if without it_?" was a question addressed by him in his old

age to a correspondent whom he was advising to burn a skeptical manuscript

written by the former.

At the age of twenty, Franklin came back from London to Philadelphia, and

it was then that the reaction in his infidel tendencies took place. From

extreme dissent he was brought by a process of reasoning, as purely

inductive as any that he ever pursued as a philosopher, to believe that he

had wandered off into the paths of error, and should make his way back to

the narrow but safer road. Under his perverting influence, his friend

Collins had become a free-thinker, and Collins had soon acquired a habit of

sotting with brandy, and had never repaid to him the portion of Mr.

Vernon's money which he had borrowed from him. Under the same influence,

his friend, Ralph had become a free-thinker, and Ralph had been equally

faithless in the discharge of his pecuniary obligations to him. Sir William

Keith, the Colonial Governor of Pennsylvania, whose fair promises, as we

shall see, had led him on a fool's errand to London, was a free-thinker,

and Sir William had proved an unprincipled cozener. Benjamin Franklin

himself was a free-thinker, and Benjamin Franklin had forgotten the faith

that he plighted to Deborah Read, and had converted Mr. Vernon's money to

his own use. The final result, Franklin tells us, was that his pamphlet on

_Liberty and Necessity_ appeared now not so clever a performance as he once

thought it, and he doubted whether some error had not insinuated itself

unperceived into his argument, so as to infect all that followed, as was

common with metaphysical reasonings. From this point, the drift to the

_Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_, the little book of moral

practice, the _Art of Virtue_, the Rev. Mr. Hemphill and Christ Church was

natural enough.

We might add that the views upon which Franklin's mind finally settled down

after its recoil from his pamphlet on _Liberty and Necessity_ persisted

until his last day. In a letter to Ezra Stiles, written but a little over a

month before his death, he made the following statement of his faith:

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 endeavour in a few

Words to gratify it. Here is my Creed. I believe in one

God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his

Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. 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 Principles of 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 the System of Morals and

his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World

ever saw or is likely 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; tho' 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 better

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 thro' a long life, I have no doubt of its

Continuance in the next, though without the smallest

conceit of meriting such Goodness.

It is amusing to compare this letter written in America to the President of

Yale College with what Franklin had previously written to Madame Brillon,

when she objected to the marriage of her daughter to William Temple

Franklin partly on the score of religious incompatibility: "These are my

ideas. In each Religion, there are certain essential things, and there are

others that are only Forms and Modes; just as a loaf of Sugar may happen to

be wrapped up in either brown, or white or blue Paper, tied up with either

red or yellow hempen or worsted twine. In every instance the essential

thing is the sugar itself. Now the essentials of a good Religion consist,

it seems to me, in these 5 Articles viz." Then ensues a statement of

practically the same fundamental tenets as those that he afterwards laid

before Ezra Stiles; except that, when he wrote to Madame Brillon, he was

not certain whether we should be rewarded or punished according to our

deserts in this life or in the life to come. He then adds: "These

Essentials are found in both your Religion and ours, the differences are

only Paper and Twine."

Dr. Priestley, in his _Autobiography_, laments that a man of Dr. Franklin's

general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever

in Christianity, and should also have done as much as he did to make others

unbelievers. Franklin acknowledged to this friend that he had not given as

much attention as he ought to have done to the evidences of Christianity,

and, at his request, Priestley recommended to him several books on the

subject, which he does not seem to have read. As Priestley himself rejected

the doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, Original Sin and Miraculous

Inspiration, and considered Christ to be "a mere man," though divinely

commissioned and assisted, his fitness for the office of winning Franklin

over to Christianity might well have been questioned. He belonged to the

same category as Dr. Richard Price, that other warm friend of Franklin, who

came into Franklin's mind when Sir John Pringle asked him whether he knew

where he could go to hear a preacher of _rational_ Christianity.

Franklin, it passes without saying, had his laugh at Religion as he had at

everything else at times. "Some have observed," he says of the clergy in

his _Apology for Printers_, "that 'tis a fruitful Topic, and the easiest to

be witty upon of all others." For the earliest outbreak of his humor on the

subject, we are indebted to William Temple Franklin. Young Benjamin found

the long graces uttered by his father before and after meals rather

tedious. "I think, father," said he one day after the provisions for the

winter had been salted, "if you were to say grace over the whole cask, once

for all, it would be a vast saving of time." Some of his later jests, at

the expense of Religion, read as if they were conceived at the period, upon

which his vow of silence called a halt, when, according to the

_Autobiography_, he was getting into the habit of prattling, punning and

joking, which only made him acceptable to trifling company. Others,

however, have the earmarks of his humorous spirit in its more noteworthy

manifestations. When he was off on his military excursion against the

Indians, his command had for its chaplain a zealous Presbyterian minister,

Mr. Beatty, who complained to him that the men did not generally attend his

prayers and exhortations. When they enlisted, they were promised, besides

pay and provisions, a gill of rum a day, which was punctually served out to

them, half in the morning, and the other half in the evening.

I observ'd [says Franklin in the _Autobiography_] they

were as punctual in attending to receive it; upon which

I said to Mr. Beatty, "It is, perhaps, below the

dignity of your profession to act as steward of the

rum, but if you were to deal it out and only just after

prayers, you would have them all about you." He liked

the tho't, undertook the office, and, with the help of

a few hands to measure out the liquor, executed it to

satisfaction, and never were prayers more generally and

more punctually attended; so that I thought this method

preferable to the punishment inflicted by some military

laws for non-attendance on divine service.

The efficacy itself of prayer also elicited some bantering comments from

him. Alluding to the prayers offered up in New England for the reduction of

Louisburg, he wrote to John Franklin:

Some seem to think forts are as easy taken as snuff.

Father Moody's prayers look tolerably modest. You have

a fast and prayer day for that purpose; in which I

compute five hundred thousand petitions were offered up

to the same effect in New England, which added to the

petitions of every family morning and evening,

multiplied by the number of days since January 25th,

make forty-five millions of prayers; which, set against

the prayers of a few priests in the garrison, to the

Virgin Mary, give a vast balance in your favour.

If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an

indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such

cases, as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong

towns I should have more dependence on _works_, than on

_faith_; for, like the kingdom of heaven, they are to

be taken by force and violence; and in a French

garrison I suppose there are devils of that kind, that

they are not to be cast out by prayers and fasting,

unless it be by their own fasting for want of

provisions.

We can readily imagine that more than one mirth-provoking letter like this

from the pen of Franklin passed into the general circulation of Colonial

humor.

As for the humorist, he did not fail to return to the subject a little

later on, when Louisburg, after being bandied about between English and

French control, was again in the hands of the English. "I congratulate

you," he said to Jane Mecom, "on the conquest of Cape Breton, and hope as

your people took it by praying, the first time, you will now pray that it

may never be given up again, which you then forgot."

In his _A Letter from China_, he makes the sailor, who is supposed to be

narrating his experiences in China, say that he asked his Chinese master

why they did not go to church to pray, as was done in Europe, and was

answered that they paid the priests to pray for them that they might stay

at home, and mind their business, and that it would be a folly to pay

others for praying, and then go and do the praying themselves, and that the

more work they did, while the priests prayed, the better able they were to

pay them well for praying.

After expressing his regret in a letter from New York to Colonel Henry

Bouquet, the hero of the battle of Bushy Run, that because of business he

could enjoy so little of the conversation of that gallant officer at

Philadelphia, he exclaimed: "How happy are the Folks in Heaven, who, 'tis

said, have nothing to do, but to talk with one another, except now and then

a little Singing & Drinking of Aqua Vitae."

His leniency in relation to the Sabbath also vented itself in a jocose

letter to Jared Ingersoll:

I should be glad to know what it is that distinguishes

Connecticut religion from common religion. Communicate,

if you please, some of these particulars that you think

will amuse me as a virtuoso. When I travelled in

Flanders, I thought of our excessively strict

observation of Sunday; and that a man could hardly

travel on that day among you upon his lawful occasions

without hazard of punishment; while, where I was, every

one travelled, if he pleased, or diverted himself in

any other way; and in the afternoon both high and low

went to the play or the opera, where there was plenty

of singing, fiddling and dancing. I looked around for

God's judgments, but saw no signs of them. The cities

were well built and full of inhabitants, the markets

filled with plenty, the people well-favoured and well

clothed, the fields well tilled, the cattle fat and

strong, the fences, houses, and windows all in repair,

and no Old Tenor (paper money) anywhere in the country;

which would almost make one suspect that the Deity is

not so angry at that offence as a New England Justice.

The joke sometimes turns up when we are least expecting it, if it can be

said that there is ever a time when a flash of wit or humor from Franklin

surprises us. In a letter to Richard Price, asking him for a list of good

books, such as were most proper to inculcate principles of sound religion

and just government, he informs Price that, a new town in Massachusetts

having done him the honor to name itself after him, and proposing to build

a steeple to their meeting-house, if he would give them a bell, he had

advised the sparing themselves the expense of a steeple for the present and

that they would accept of books instead of a bell; "sense being preferable

to sound." There is a gleam of the same sort in his revised version of the

Lord's Prayer; for, almost incredible as the fact is, his irreverent hand

tinkered even with this most sacred of human petitions. "Our Liturgy," he

said, "uses neither the _Debtors_ of Matthew, nor the _indebted_ of Luke,

but instead of them speaks of _those that trespass against us_. Perhaps the

Considering it as a Christian Duty to forgive Debtors, was by the Compilers

thought an inconvenient Idea in a trading Nation." Sometimes his humor is

so delicate and subtle that even acute intellects, without a keen sense of

the ludicrous, mistake it all for labored gravity. This is true of his

modernized version of part of the first chapter of Job, where, for

illustration, for the words, "But put forth thine hand now, and touch all

that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face," he suggests the

following: "Try him;--only withdraw your favor, turn him out of his places,

and withhold his pensions, and you will soon find him in the opposition."

It is a remarkable fact that more than one celebrated man of letters has

accepted this exquisite parody as a serious intrusion by Franklin into a

reformatory field for which he was unfitted. We dare say that, if Franklin

could have anticipated such a result, he would have experienced a degree of

pleasure in excess of even that which he was in the habit of feeling when

he had successfully passed off his Parable against Persecution on some one

as an extract from the Bible.

There is undeniably a lack of reality, a certain sort of hollowness about

his religious views. When we tap them, a sound, as of an empty cask, comes

back to us. They are distinguished by very much the same want of

spontaneous, instinctive feeling, the same artificial cast, the same

falsetto note as his system of moral practice and his _Art of Virtue_.

Indeed, to a very great degree they are but features of his system of

morals. That he ever gave any sincere credence to the written creed of his

youth, with its graded Pantheon of Gods, is, of course, inconceivable. This

was a mere academic and transitional conceit, inspired by the first

youthful impulses of his recession from extreme irreligion to lukewarm

acquiescence in accepted religious conventions. Nor can we say that his

belief in a single Deity was much more genuine or vital, confidently as he

professed to commit himself to the wisdom and goodness of this Deity. There

is nothing in his writings, full of well-rounded thanksgiving and praise as

they sometimes are, to justify the conclusion that to him God was anything

more than the personification, more or less abstract, of those cosmic

forces, with which he was so conversant, and of those altruistic promptings

of the human heart, of which he himself was such a beneficent example. The

Fatherhood of God was a passive conception to which his mind was conducted

almost solely by his active, ever-present sense of the Brotherhood of Man.

But it is no greater misconception to think of Franklin as a Christian than

to think of him as a scoffer. He was no scoffer. A laugh or a smile for

some ceremonious or extravagant feature of religion he had at times, as we

have seen, but no laugh or smile except such as can be reconciled with a

substantial measure of genuine religious good-faith. It was never any part

of his purpose to decry Religion, to undermine its influence, or to weaken

its props. He was too full of the scientific spirit of speculation and

distrust, he was too practical and worldly-wise to readily surrender the

right of private judgment, or to give himself over to any form of truly

devotional fervor, but he had entirely too keen an appreciation of the

practical value of religion in restraining human vices and passions and

promoting human benevolence to have any disposition to destroy or impair

its sway. The motive of his existence was not to unsettle men, nor to cast

them adrift, nor to hold out to them novel projects of self-improvement,

not rooted in fixed human prepossessions and experience, but to discipline

them, to free them from social selfishness, to keep them in subjection to

all the salutary restraints, which the past had shown to be good for them.

Of these restraints, he knew that those imposed by Religion were among the

most potent, and to Religion, therefore, he adhered, if for no other

reason, because it was the most helpful ally of human morality, and of the

municipal ordinances by which human morality is enforced. From what he said

to Lord Kames, it seems that he regarded his _Art of Virtue_ as a

supplement to Religion, though really with more truth it might be asserted

that it was Religion which was the supplement to his _Art of Virtue_.

Christians [he said] are directed to have faith in

Christ, as the effectual means of obtaining the change

they desire. It may, when sufficiently strong, be

effectual with many: for a full opinion, that a Teacher

is infinitely wise, good, and powerful, and that he

will certainly reward and punish the obedient and

disobedient, must give great weight to his precepts,

and make them much more attended to by his disciples.

But many have this faith in so weak a degree, that it

does not produce the effect. Our _Art of Virtue_ may,

therefore, be of great service to those whose faith is

unhappily not so strong, and may come in aid of its

weakness.

How little Franklin was inclined to undervalue Religion as a support of

good conduct is, among other things, shown by the concern which he

occasionally expressed in his letters, when he was abroad, that his wife

and daughter should not be slack in attending divine worship. One of his

letters to Sally of this nature we have already quoted. Another to his wife

expresses the hope that Sally "continues to love going to Church," and

states that he would have her read over and over again the Whole Duty of

Man and the Lady's Library. In another letter to his wife, he says: "You

spent your Sunday very well, but I think you should go oftner to Church."

Fortified as he was by his _Art of Virtue_, he felt that church attendance

was but a matter of secondary importance for him, but he was eager that his

wife and daughter, who had not acquired the habitude of the virtues as he

had, should not neglect the old immemorial aids to rectitude.

Even to the levity, with which religious topics might be handled, he set

distinct limits. He had no objection to a good-humored joke at the expense

of their superficial aspects even if it was a little broad, but with

malignant or derisive attacks upon religion he had no sympathy whatever. In

the _Autobiography_, he denounces with manifest sincerity, as a wicked

travesty, the doggerel version of the Bible, composed by Dr. Brown, who

kept the inn, eight or ten miles from Burlington, at which he lodged

overnight, on his first journey from Boston to Philadelphia. Nothing that

he ever wrote is wiser or sounder than the letter which he addressed to a

friend, dissuading him from publishing a "piece," impugning the Doctrine of

a Special Providence. In its utilitarian conceptions of religion and

virtue, in the emphasis placed by it upon habit as the best security for

righteous conduct, in the cautious respect that it manifests for the

general sentiments of mankind on religious subjects, we have a concise

revelation of his whole attitude towards Religion, when he was turning his

face seriously towards it.

By the Argument it contains against the Doctrines of a

particular Providence [he said], tho' you allow a

general Providence, you strike at the Foundation of all

Religion. For without the Belief of a Providence, that

takes Cognizance of, guards, and guides, and may favour

particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a

Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its

Protection. I will not enter into any Discussion of

your Principles, tho' you seem to desire it. At present

I shall only give you my Opinion, that, though your

Reasonings are subtile, and may prevail with some

Readers, you will not succeed so as to change the

general Sentiments of Mankind on that Subject, and the

Consequence of printing this Piece will be, a great

deal of Odium drawn upon yourself, Mischief to you, and

no Benefit to others. He that spits against the Wind,

spits in his own Face.

But, were you to succeed, do you imagine any Good would

be done by it? You yourself may find it easy to live a

virtuous Life, without the Assistance afforded by

Religion; you having a clear Perception of the

Advantages of Virtue, and the Disadvantages of Vice,

and possessing a Strength of Resolution sufficient to

enable you to resist common Temptations. But think how

great a Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and

ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc'd, and

inconsiderate Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the

Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to

support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice

of it till it becomes _habitual_, which is the great

Point for its Security. And perhaps you are indebted to

her originally, that is, to your Religious Education,

for the Habits of Virtue upon which you now justly

value yourself. You might easily display your excellent

Talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and

thereby obtain a Rank with our most distinguish'd

Authors. For among us it is not necessary, as among the

Hottentots, that a Youth, to be receiv'd into the

Company of men, should prove his Manhood by beating his

Mother.

I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt

unchaining the Tyger, but to burn this Piece before it

is seen by any other Person; whereby you will save

yourself a great deal of Mortification from the Enemies

it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of

Regret and Repentence.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Kent was evidently something of a character. In a letter to his friend

Mrs. Catherine Greene, in 1764, Franklin said: "Mr. Kent's compliment is a

very extraordinary one, as he was obliged to kill himself and two others in

order to make it; but, being killed in imagination only, they and he are

all yet alive and well, thanks to God, and I hope will continue so as long

as, dear Katy, your affectionate friend, B. FRANKLIN."

[8] We are informed by Franklin in the _Autobiography_ that he inserted on

one page of his "little book" a "scheme of employment for the twenty-four

hours of a natural day." The opening injunction of this plan of conduct

brings the wash-basin and the altar into rather amusing juxtaposition:

"Rise, wash, and address _Powerful Goodness_!"