Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2)
by Wiliam Cabell Bruce · English · Gutenberg #36896 · 1,101,048 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2)
Author: Wiliam Cabell Bruce
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, SELF-REVEALED, VOLUME 1 (OF 2) ***
Produced by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucc and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive.)
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
SELF-REVEALED
A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY BASED MAINLY ON HIS OWN WRITINGS
BY
WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME I
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
_The Knickerbocker Press_
1917
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY
W. CABELL BRUCE
_The Knickerbocker Press, New York_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER
I.--FRANKLIN'S MORAL STANDING AND SYSTEM 12
II.--FRANKLIN'S RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 51
III.--FRANKLIN, THE PHILANTHROPIST AND CITIZEN 102
IV.--FRANKLIN'S FAMILY RELATIONS 198
V.--FRANKLIN'S AMERICAN FRIENDS 310
VI.--FRANKLIN'S BRITISH FRIENDS 372
VII.--FRANKLIN'S FRENCH FRIENDS 473
Benjamin Franklin
Self-Revealed
Introduction
In reading the life of Benjamin Franklin, the most lasting impressions left
upon the mind are those of versatility and abundance. His varied genius
lent itself without effort to the minutest details of such commonplace
things as the heating and ventilation of rooms, the correction of smoky
chimneys and naval architecture and economy. His severely practical turn of
mind was disclosed even in the devices with which he is pictured in his old
age as relieving the irksomeness of physical effort--the rolling press with
which he copied his letters, the fan which he worked with his foot in warm
weather as he sat reading, the artificial hand with which he reached the
books on the upper shelves of his library. But, sober as Franklin's genius
on this side was, it proved itself equal to some of the most exacting
demands of physical science; and above all to the sublime task, which
created such a world-wide stir, of reducing the wild and mysterious
lightning of the heavens to captivity, and bringing it down in fluttering
helplessness to the earth. It was a rare mind indeed which could give happy
expression to homely maxims of plodding thrift, and yet entertain noble
visions of universal philanthropy. The stretch between Franklin's weighty
observations on Population, for instance, and the bright, graceful
bagatelles, with which his pen occasionally trifled, was not a short one;
but it was compassed by his intellect without the slightest evidence of
halting facility. It is no exaggeration to say that this intellect was an
organ lacking in no element of power except that which can be supplied by a
profound spiritual insight and a kindling imagination alone. _The
Many-Sided Franklin_, the title of the essay by Paul Leicester Ford, is a
felicitous touch of description. The life, the mind, the character of the
man were all manifold, composite, marked by spacious breadth and freedom.
It is astonishing into how many different provinces his career can be
divided. Franklin, the Man of Business, Franklin, the Philosopher,
Franklin, the Writer, Franklin, the Statesman, Franklin, the Diplomatist,
have all been the subjects of separate literary treatment. As a man of
business, he achieved enough, when the limitations of his time and
environment are considered, to make him a notable precursor of the strong
race of self-created men, bred by the later material expansion of America.
As a scientist, his brilliant electrical discoveries gave him for a while,
as contemporary literature so strikingly evinces, a position of
extraordinary pre-eminence. As a writer, he can claim the distinction of
having composed two productions, _The Autobiography_ and _The Way to
Wealth_, which are read the world over. Of his reputation as a statesman it
is enough to remark that his signature is attached to the Declaration of
Independence, the Treaty of Alliance between the United States and France,
the Treaty of Peace between Great Britain and the United States, and the
Federal Constitution. Of his labors as a diplomatist it may be said that,
if it is true that, without the continuous assistance of France, our
independence would not have been secured, it is perhaps equally true that,
without his wisdom, tact and European prestige, we should never have
retained this assistance, so often imperilled by the jealousy and vanity of
his colleagues as well as by the usual accidents of international
intercourse. His life was like a full five-act play--prophetic prologue and
stately epilogue, and swelling scene imposed upon swelling scene, until the
tallow chandler's son, rising from the humblest levels of human fortune to
the highest by uninterrupted gradations of invincible success, finally
becomes the recipient of such a degree of impressive homage as has rarely
been paid to anyone by the admiration and curiosity of mankind.
To such a diversified career as this the element of mere longevity was, of
course, indispensable. Renown so solid and enduring as that of Franklin and
acquired in so many different fields was not a thing to be achieved by a
few fortunate strokes. He did not awake one morning, as did Byron, to find
himself famous; though his fame in the province of electrical science
travelled fast when it once got under way. Such a full-orbed renown could
be produced only by the long gestation of many years of physical vigor and
untiring activity. With the meagre opportunities afforded by colonial
conditions for the accumulation of wealth, there had to be an extended
period of unflagging attention to Poor Richard's saying: "Many a little
makes a mickle." To this period belong some things that the self-revelation
of the _Autobiography_, unselfish as it is, cannot dignify, or even redeem
from moral squalor, and other things which even the frankness itself of the
_Autobiography_ is not frank enough to disclose. Then there is the unique
story, imprinted upon the face of Philadelphia to this day, of his fruitful
exertions as Town Oracle and City Builder. Then there is the episode of
scientific inquiry, all too brief, when the prosperous printer and
tradesman, appraising wealth at its true value, turns away from his
printing press and stock of merchandise to give himself up with
enthusiastic ardor to the study of electrical phenomena. Then there is the
long term of public employment, beginning with the Clerkship of the
Pennsylvania Assembly and not ending until, after many years of illustrious
public service as legislator, administrator, diplomatic agent and foreign
minister, Franklin complains in a letter to Dr. and Mrs. John Bard that the
public, not content with eating his flesh, seems resolved to pick his
bones.
The amount of work that he did, the mass of results that he accomplished,
during the long tract of time covered by his life, is simply prodigious.
Primarily, Franklin was a man of action. The reputation that he coveted
most was, as he declared, in a letter to Samuel Mather, that of a doer of
good. Utility was the standard set by him for all his activities, and even
his system of ethics did not escape the hard, griping pressure of this
standard. What he aimed at from first to last, whether in the domain of
science, literature or government, was practical results, and men, as they
are known to experienced and shrewd, though kindly, observers of men, were
the agencies with which he sought to accomplish such results. He never lost
sight of the sound working principle, which the mere academician or closet
philosopher is so prone to forget, that the game cannot be played except
with the chess-men upon the board. But happily for the world few men of
action have ever bequeathed to posterity such abundant written records of
their lives. When Franklin desired to promote any project or to carry any
point, he invariably, or all but invariably, invoked the aid of his pen to
attain his end. To write for money, or for the mere pleasure of writing, or
even for literary fame was totally alien to the purposes for which he
wrote. A pen was to him merely another practical instrument for forwarding
some private aim of his or some definite public or political object, to
which his sympathies and powers were committed, or else but an aid to
social amusement. As the result of this secondary kind of literary
activity, he left behind him a body of writings of one kind or another
which enables us to measure far more accurately than we should otherwise
have been able to do the amount of thought and performance crowded into
those eventful years of lusty and prolific existence. In the Library of
Congress, in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, in the
Library of the University of Pennsylvania, in numerous other collections in
both hemispheres are found the outflowings of a brain to which exuberance
of production was as natural as rank vegetation to a fat soil. Nor should
it be forgotten that many of his papers have perished, which, if still
extant, would furnish additional proofs of the fertility of his genius and
swell the sum of pleasure and instruction which we derive from his works.
With the sigh that we breathe over the lost productions of antiquity might
well be mingled another over the papers and letters which were confided by
Franklin, on the eve of his mission to France, to the care of Joseph
Galloway, only to fall a prey to ruthless spoliation and dispersion. To
look forward to a long winter evening enlivened by the missing letters that
he wrote to his close friends, Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph's,
"the good Bishop," as he called him, Sir Edward Newenham, of the Irish
Parliament, and Jan Ingenhousz, physician to Maria Theresa, would alone, to
one familiar with his correspondence, be as inviting a prospect as could be
held out to any reader with a relish for the intimate letters of a wise,
witty and humorous letter-writer.
The length of time during which the subtle and powerful mind of Franklin
was at work is, we repeat, a fact that must be duly taken into account in
exploring the foundations of his celebrity. "By living twelve years beyond
David's period," he said in one of his letters to George Whatley, "I seem
to have intruded myself into the company of posterity, when I ought to have
been abed and asleep." He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 6
(old style), 1706, and died in the City of Philadelphia on April 17, 1790.
At the time of his birth, Anne was in the fourth year of her reign as Queen
of England, and Louis XIV. was King of France. Only eighty-five years had
elapsed since the landing at Plymouth. More than three years were to elapse
before the battle of Malplaquet, more than five years before the
publication of the first _Spectator_, twenty years before the publication
of _Gulliver's Travels_. Franklin's name was an honored one not only in his
native land but beyond seas before any of the other great men who signed
the Declaration of Independence had emerged from provincial obscurity. His
birth preceded that of Washington by twenty-six years, that of John Adams
by thirty years, that of Jefferson by thirty-seven years. Coming into the
world only fifteen years after the outbreak of the witchcraft delusion at
Salem, he lived to be a member of the Federal Convention and to pass down
to us as modern in spirit and purpose as the American House of
Representatives or the American Patent Office. He, at least, is a standing
refutation of the claim that all the energetic tasks of human life are
performed by young men. He was seventy years of age when he arrived in
France to enter upon the laborious diplomatic career which so signally
increased the lustre of his fame and so gloriously prospered our national
fortunes; and he was seventy-nine years of age when his mission ended. But
even then, weighed down though he was by the strong hand of time and vexed
by diseases which left him little peace, there was no danger that he would
be classed by anyone with the old townsmen of whom Lord Bacon speaks "that
will be still sitting at their Street doore though thereby they offer Age
to Scorne." After his return from France, he lived long enough to be thrice
elected President of the State of Pennsylvania and to be a useful member of
the Convention that framed the Federal Constitution; and only twenty-four
days before his death he wrote the speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the
petition of the Erika, or Purists for the abolition of piracy and slavery
which is one of the happiest effusions of his satirical genius.
_Multos da annos_ is a prayer, we may readily believe, that is often
granted by the Gods with a scornful smile. In the case of Franklin, even
without such a protracted term of life as was his portion, he would still
have enjoyed a distinguished place in the memory of men, but not that
broad, branching, full-crowned fame which makes him one of the most
conspicuous landmarks of the eighteenth century.
And fully in keeping with the extent of this fame was the extent of his
relationship to the social and intellectual world of his time. The main
background of his life, of course, was American--Lake Champlain, the St.
Lawrence, the Charles, the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Delaware and the
Ohio rivers; the long western reaches of the Atlantic; the dark curtain of
firs and hemlocks and primeval masses of rock which separated the two
powers that ceaselessly struggled for the mastery of the continent, and
rarely lifted except to reveal some appalling tragedy, chargeable to the
French and their dread ally, the Red Indian; Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Fort Duquesne--all the internal features and surroundings in
a word of the long, narrow strip of English territory between Boston and
Philadelphia with which he was so familiar, and over which his influence
was asserted in so many ways. With the exception of his brief sojourn in
London in his youth, his whole life was passed in the Colonies until he was
fifty-one years of age. Before he sailed for England in 1757, upon his
first foreign mission, the circumstances of his career had been such as to
make him generally known to the people of the Colonies. His _Almanac_, his
_Gazette_, his pithy sayings, his humorous stories, his visits to Boston,
attended by the formation of so many wayside friendships, his postal
expeditions, the printing presses set up by him at many different points,
his private fortune, his public services, his electrical experiments were
all breath for the trump of his fame. He knew Colonial America as few
Colonial Americans knew it. He was born and reared in Boston, and, after
his removal to Philadelphia, he revisited his native city at regular
intervals. "The Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice, and
accent in pronunciation, all please, and seem to refresh and revive me," he
said in his old age in a letter to the Rev. John Lathrop. Philadelphia, the
most populous and opulent of the colonial towns, was his lifelong place of
residence. In the _Autobiography_ he refers to it as "A city I love, having
lived many years in it very happily." He appears to have been quite
frequently in New York. His postal duties took him as far south as
Williamsburg, and the Albany Congress drew him as far north of New York as
Albany. He was in the camp of Braddock at Frederick, Maryland, just before
that rash and ill-starred general set out upon his long, dolorous march
through the wilderness where disaster and death awaited him. Facts like
these signify but little now when transit from one distant point to another
in the United States is effected with such amazing rapidity, but they
signified much under the crude conditions of colonial life. Once at least
did Franklin have his shoulder dislocated by an accident on the atrocious
roads of Colonial New England. Once he was thrown into the water from an
upset canoe near Staten Island. His masterly answers, when examined before
the House of Commons, showed how searchingly conversant he was with
everything that related to America. For some of our most penetrating
glances into colonial life we are indebted to his writings; particularly
instructive being his observations upon population in the Colonies, the
economic condition and political temper of their people and the
characteristics and habits of the Indians. It was a broad experience which
touched at one extreme the giddy and artificial life of Paris, on the eve
of the French Revolution, and at the other the drunken Indian orgies at the
conclusion of the treaty at Carlisle which Franklin has depicted in the
_Autobiography_ with a brush worthy of Rembrandt in these words: "Their
dark-colour'd bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the
bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied
by their horrid yellings, form'd a scene the most resembling our ideas of
hell that could well be imagin'd."
But the peculiar distinction of Franklin is that his life stands out
vividly upon an European as well as an American background. It is
interesting to contrast the scene at Carlisle with the opera in honor of
the Comte du Nord, at which he was present, during the French mission. "The
House," he says in his _Journal of the Negotiation for Peace with Great
Britain_, "being richly finish'd with abundance of Carving and Gilding,
well Illuminated with Wax Tapers, and the Company all superbly drest, many
of the Men in Cloth of Tissue, and the Ladies sparkling with Diamonds,
form'd altogether the most splendid Spectacle my Eyes ever beheld." Until
the august figure of Washington filled the eye of mankind, Franklin was the
only American who had ever won a solid and splendid European reputation.
The opportunity had not yet arisen for the lively French imagination to
declare that he had snatched the sceptre from tyrants, but the first half
of Turgot's tremendous epigram had been realized; for the lightning he had
snatched, or rather filched, from the sky. It may well be doubted whether
any one private individual with such limited pecuniary resources ever did
as much for the moral and intellectual welfare of any one community as
Franklin did for pre-revolutionary Philadelphia; but it was impossible that
such aspirations and powers as his should be confined within the pale of
colonial provincialism. His widespread fame, his tolerant disposition, his
early residence in England, his later residence there for long periods, his
excursions into Scotland and Ireland and Continental countries, the society
of men of the world in London and other great cities combined to endow him
with a character truly cosmopolitan which was to be still further
liberalized by French influence. During his life, he crossed the Atlantic
no less than eight times. After 1757 the greater part of his life was spent
abroad. Of the eighty-four years, of which his existence was made up, some
twenty-six were passed in England and France. He was as much at home on The
Strand as on Market Street in Philadelphia. The friendships that he formed
in England and France were almost as close as those that he had formed in
Pennsylvania with his cronies, Hugh Roberts and John Bartram. He became so
thoroughly domesticated in England during his periods of sojourn in that
country that he thought of remaining there for the rest of his life, and
yet, if the Brillons had only been willing to confer the hand of their
daughter upon his grandson, William Temple Franklin, he would contentedly
have died in France. If there ever was an American, if there ever was a
citizen of the world, if there ever was a true child of the eighteenth
century, it was he. His humanitarian sympathies, his catholic temper, his
generous, unobstructed outlook enabled him without difficulty to adjust
himself with ease to the genius of every people with whom he was brought
into familiar contact. In America he was such a thorough American in every
respect that Carlyle is said to have termed him on one occasion, "The
Father of all the Yankees." In England he was English enough to feel the
full glow of her greatness and to see her true interests far more clearly
than she saw them herself. He had too many Anglo-Saxon traits to become
wholly a Frenchman when he lived in France, but he became French enough to
truly love France and her people and to be truly beloved by them. In the
opinion of Sainte-Beuve he is the most French of all Americans.
CHAPTER I
Franklin's Moral Standing and System
Until a comparatively recent period totally false conceptions in some
respects of Franklin's character were not uncommon. To many he was merely
the father of a penurious, cheese-paring philosophy, and to no little
extent the idea prevailed that his own nature and conduct corresponded with
its precepts. There could be no greater error. Of the whole science of
prudential economy a master indeed he was. His observations upon human
life, in its pecuniary relations, and upon the methods, by which affluence
and ease are to be wrested from the reluctant grasp of poverty, are always
sagacious in the highest degree. Poor Richard is quite as consummate a
master of the science of rising in the world as Aristotle is of the Science
of Politics or Mill of the Science of Political Economy. Given health and
strength, a man, who faithfully complied with his shrewd injunctions and
yet did not prosper, would be as much a freak of nature as a man who thrust
his hand into the fire and yet received no physical hurt. The ready and
universal assent given to their full truth and force by human experience is
attested by the fact that _The Way to Wealth_, or _The Speech of Father
Abraham_, "the plain, clean old Man with white Locks" in which Franklin,
when writing one of the prefaces of _Poor Richard's Almanac_, condensed the
wit and wisdom, original and second hand, of that incomparable manual of
_The Art of Material Success_, has, through innumerable editions and
reprints, and translations into every written tongue from the French to the
Russian and Chinese, become almost as well known to the entire civilized
globe as the unbroken strain of the martial airs of England. So well
calculated, it was thought, was it to promote sound principles of diligence
and frugality that it was, we are told by Franklin, reprinted in England,
to be set up in the form of a broadside in houses, and, when translated
into French, was bought by the clergy and gentry of France for distribution
among their poor parishioners and tenants. But so far from being the slave
of a parsimonious spirit was Franklin that it would be difficult to single
out any self-made man who ever formed a saner estimate of the value of
money than he did or lived up to it more fearlessly. In seeking money, he
was actuated, as his early retirement from business proved, only by the
high-minded motive to self-enrichment which is so pointedly expressed in
the lines of Burns:
"Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent."
No sooner did he accumulate a sufficient fortune to provide for the
reasonable wants of his family and himself than he proceeded to make this
fortune the handmaid of some of the higher things of life--wholesome
reading, scientific research, public usefulness, schemes of beneficence. In
1748, when he was in the full flush of business success and but forty-two
years of age, he deliberately, for the sake of such things, retired from
all active connection with business pursuits. In a letter to Abiah
Franklin, his mother, shortly after he found himself free forever from the
cares of his shop, he speaks of himself in these words: "I enjoy, thro'
Mercy, a tolerable Share of Health. I read a great deal, ride a little, do
a little Business for myself, more for others, retire when I can, and go
into Company when I please; so the Years roll round, and the last will
come; when I would rather have it said, _He lived Usefully_, than _He died
Rich_." About the same time, he wrote to William Strahan, a business
correspondent, that the very notion of _dying worth_ a great sum was to him
absurd, and just the same as if a man should run in debt for one thousand
superfluities, to the end that, when he should be stripped of all, and
imprisoned by his creditors, it might be said, he _broke worth_ a great
sum. On more than one occasion, when there was a call upon his public zeal,
his response was generous to the point of imprudence. The bond that he gave
to indemnify against loss the owners of the wagons and horses procured by
his energy and address for Braddock's expedition led to claims against him
to the amount of nearly twenty thousand pounds, which would have ruined
him, if the British Government had not rescued him after long delay from
his dreadful situation. Without hesitation he entered during his first
mission to England into a personal engagement that an act taxing the estate
of the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania in common with the estates of the
People of Pennsylvania would not result in any injustice to the
Proprietaries. On a later occasion, in order to prevent war between Great
Britain and her Colonies, he was willing to bind himself, to the whole
extent of his private fortune, to make pecuniary reparation for the
destruction of the tea cast into Boston harbor, if the Province of
Massachusetts did not do so. One of his last acts before leaving America
for his mission to France was to place the sum of three or four thousand
pounds, which was a large part of this fortune, and all the ready money at
his command, at the disposal of Congress. His salary as President of
Pennsylvania was all given or bequeathed by him to public objects. The
small sums, to which he became entitled as one of the next of kin of his
father and his cousin, Mrs. Fisher, of Wellingborough, England, he
relinquished to members of the family connection who needed them more than
he did. Once, though a commercial panic was prevailing, he pledged his
credit to the extent of five thousand pounds for the purpose of supporting
that of a London friend. His correspondence nowhere indicates any degree of
pecuniary caution in excess of the proper demands of good sense. On the
contrary, it furnishes repeated testimony to his promptitude in honoring
the solicitations of private distress or subscribing to public purposes.
Conspicuously unselfish was he when the appeal was to his public spirit or
to his interest in the general welfare of mankind. Among his innumerable
benefactions was a gift of one thousand pounds to Franklin College,
Pennsylvania. When he invented his open stove for the better warming of
rooms, he gave the model to his friend, Robert Grace, who found, Franklin
tells us in the _Autobiography_, the casting of the plates for the stove at
his furnace near Philadelphia a profitable thing. So far from begrudging
this profit to his friend, he wrote his interesting _Account of the
New-invented Pennsylvanian Fireplaces_ to promote the public demand for the
invention. A London ironmonger made some small changes in the stove, which
were worse than of no value to it, and reaped, Franklin was told, a little
fortune by it. "And this," he says in the _Autobiography_, "is not the only
instance of patents taken out for my inventions by others, tho' not always
with the same success, which I never contested, as having no desire of
profiting by patents myself, and hating disputes." When he was actually
engaged in the business of printing, a similar motive, so far as public
spirit went, led him to offer to print a treatise by Cadwallader Colden on
the _Cause of Gravitation_ at his own expense and risk. If he could be the
means of communicating anything valuable to the world, he wrote to Colden,
he did not always think of gaining nor even of saving by his business.
That the character of Franklin should ever have been deemed so meanly
covetous is due to _Poor Richard's Almanac_ and the _Autobiography_. The
former, with its hard, bare homilies upon the Gospel of Getting on in Life
and its unceasing accent upon the duty of scrimping and saving, circulated
so long and so widely throughout the Colonies that the real Franklin came
to be confused in many minds with the fictitious Poor Richard. Being
intended mainly for the instruction and amusement of the common people,
whose chief hope of bettering their condition lay in rigid self-denial, it
is naturally keyed to unison with the ruder and austerer principles of
human thrift. As to the _Autobiography_, with its host of readers, the only
Franklin known to the great majority of persons, who have any familiarity
with Franklin at all, is its Franklin, and this Franklin is the one who had
to "make the night joint-laborer with the day," breakfast on bread and milk
eaten out of a two-penny earthen porringer with a pewter spoon, and closely
heed all the sage counsels of _Poor Richard's Almanac_ before he could even
become the possessor of a china bowl and a silver spoon. It is in the
_Autobiography_ that the story of Franklin's struggle, first for the naked
means of subsistence, and then for pecuniary competency, is told; and the
harsh self-restraint, the keen eye to every opportunity for self-promotion,
and the grossly mechanical theory of morals disclosed by it readily give
color to the notion that Franklin was nothing more than a sordid
materialist. It should be remembered that it is from the _Autobiography_
that we obtain the greatest part of our knowledge of the exertions through
which he acquired his fortune, and that the successive ascending stages, by
which he climbed the steep slopes that lead up from poverty and obscurity,
are indelibly set forth in this lifelike book with a pen as coarse but at
the same time as vivid and powerful as the pencil with which Hogarth
depicts the descending stages of the Rake's Progress. And along with these
facts it should also be remembered that the didactic purpose by which the
_Autobiography_ was largely inspired should be duly allowed for before we
draw too disparaging inferences about Franklin from anything that he says
in that book with respect to his career.
It is a curious fact that almost every reproach attaching to the reputation
of Franklin is attributable to the candor of the _Autobiography_. It is
true that in the political contests between the Proprietary and Popular
Parties in Colonial Pennsylvania he was often visited with virulent abuse
by the retainers of the Proprietaries. This was merely the dirty froth
brought to the surface by every boiling pot. It is also true that, after
the transmission of the Hutchinson letters to New England, he was the
object of much savage censure at the hands of British Tories. But this
censure, for the most part, was as empty as the ravings of the particular
bigot who indorsed on the first page of a volume of letters in the Public
Record Office, in London, a statement that the thirteen letters of Doctor
Franklin in the volume were perhaps then "only precious or Important so far
as they prove and discover the Duplicity, Ingratitude, and Guilt of this
Arch Traitor whom they unveil and really unmask Displaying him as an
accomplish'd Proficient in the blacker Arts of Dissimulation and Guile."
Not less hollow was the invective with which the distempered mind of Arthur
Lee assailed the character of Franklin when they were together in France.
Nor can it be denied that in such Rabelaisian _jeux d'esprit_ as Polly
Baker's Speech, the Letter on the Choice of a Mistress, and the Essay on
Perfumes, dedicated to the Royal Academy of Brussels, in the _naivete_
which marked Franklin's relations to his natural son, William Franklin,
and to his natural son's natural son, William Temple Franklin, and in the
ease with which he adopted in his old age the tone, if not the practices,
of French gallantry, we cannot but recognize a nature too deficient in the
refinements of early social training, too physically ripe for sensual
enjoyment and too unfettered in its intellectual movements to be keenly
mindful of some of the nicer obligations of scrupulous conduct. In moral
dignity, Franklin was not George Washington, though there was no one held
in higher honor by him. "If it were a Sceptre, he has merited it, and would
become it," he said in bequeathing a fine crab-tree walking stick to
Washington, whom he termed "My friend, and the friend of mankind." If for
no other reason, Franklin was not Washington because he lacked the family
traditions and early social advantages of Washington, and perhaps
Washington might have been more like Franklin, if he had had some of
Franklin's humor. While the resemblance is limited, Franklin does resemble
in some respects Jefferson who was too scientific in spirit and too liberal
in his opinions not to be a little of a skeptic and a heretic himself. But
nothing can be more certain than the fact that Franklin was esteemed by his
contemporaries not only a great but a good man. We pass by the French
extravagance which made him out a paragon of all the virtues as well as the
_plus grand philosophe du siecle_; for the French were but mad idolaters
where he was concerned. It is sufficient for our purposes to limit
ourselves to his English and American panegyrists. Referring to Franklin's
humble birth, Benjamin Vaughan, a dull but good man, wrote to him that he
proved "how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or
greatness." In another place, Vaughan speaks of the "affection, gratitude
and veneration" he bears to Franklin. To the sober Quaker, Abel James, the
author of the _Autobiography_ was the "kind, humane, and benevolent Ben.
Franklin" whose work almost insensibly led the youth "into the resolution
of endeavoring to become as good and eminent" as himself. In urging
Franklin to complete the story of his life, he added: "I know of no
character living, nor many of them put together, who has so much in his
power as thyself to promote a greater spirit of industry and early
attention to business, frugality, and temperance with the American youth."
As Franklin's letters bring to our knowledge friend after friend of his,
among the wisest and best men of his day, on both sides of the Atlantic, we
begin to ask ourselves whether anyone ever did have such a genius for
exciting the sentiment of true, honest friendship in virtuous and useful
men. His correspondence with Catherine Ray, Polly Stevenson, and Georgiana
Shipley, though several of his letters to the first of the three are
blemished by the freedom of the times and vulgar pleasantry, demonstrates
that his capacity for awakening this sentiment was not confined to his own
sex. Inclined as he was in his earlier and later years, to use Madame
Brillon's phrase, to permit his wisdom to be broken upon the rocks of
femininity, unbecoming his advanced age and high position as was the
salacious strain which ran through his letters to this beautiful and
brilliant woman, as we shall see hereafter, nothing could illustrate better
than his relations to Polly Stevenson how essentially incorrupt his heart
was when his association was with any member of the other sex who really
had modesty to lose. Such was the pure affection entertained for him by
this fine woman that, after the death of her celebrated husband, Dr.
William Hewson, she removed from London to Philadelphia with her children
to be near the friend, little less than a father, who had lavished upon her
all that was best in both his mind and heart. There is much in the life of
Franklin to make us believe that his standards of sexual morality were
entirely too lax, but there is everything in it, too, to make us believe
that he would not only have been incapable of seducing female innocence but
would have been slow to withhold in any regard the full meed of deferential
respect due to a chaste girl or a virtuous matron. It is hard to repress a
smile when we read under the head of "Humility" in his _Table of Virtues_,
just below the words, in which, under the head of "Chastity," he deprecates
the use of "venery" to the injury of one's own or another's peace or
reputation, the injunction for his own guidance, "imitate Jesus and
Socrates." All the same, it is a fact that one person, at any rate, Jane
Mecom, his sister, even thought him not unworthy to be compared with our
Saviour. "I think," she said, "it is not profanity to compare you to our
Blessed Saviour who employed much of his time while here on earth in doing
good to the body as well as souls of men." Elizabeth Hubbard, the
stepdaughter of his brother John, even warned him that, if he was not less
zealous in doing good, he would find himself alone in heaven. Through all
the observations of his contemporaries vibrates the note that he was too
wise and benevolent to belong to anything less than the entire human race.
Jonathan Shipley, "The Good Bishop," suggested as a motto suitable to his
character, "his country's friend, but more of human kind." Burke called him
"the lover of his species." By Sir Samuel Romilly he was pronounced "one of
the best and most eminent men of the present age." Chatham eulogized him in
the House of Lords as one "whom all Europe held in high Estimation for his
Knowledge and Wisdom, and rank'd with our Boyles and Newtons; who was an
Honour, not to the English Nation only, but to Human Nature." In one of his
works, Lord Kames spoke of him as "a man who makes a great figure in the
learned world; and who would make a still greater figure for benevolence
and candor, were virtue as much regarded in this declining age as
knowledge." Less formal was the heartfelt tribute of Dr. Samuel Cooper, of
Massachusetts, after many years of intercourse: "Your friendship has united
two things in my bosom that seldom meet, pride and consolation: it has been
the honor and the balm of my life." And when towards the close of
Franklin's life he wrote to George Washington, "In whatever State of
Existence I am plac'd hereafter, if I retain any Memory of what has pass'd
here, I shall with it retain the Esteem, Respect, and Affection, with which
I have long been, my dear Friend, yours most sincerely," he received a
reply, which was not only a reply, but the stately, measured judgment of a
man who never spoke any language except that of perfect sincerity. "If,"
said Washington, "to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for
talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for
philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing
consolation to know, that you have not lived in vain." "And I flatter
myself," he continued, "that it will not be ranked among the least grateful
occurrences of your life to be assured that, so long as I retain my memory,
you will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your
sincere friend." These were credentials indeed for the old printer to take
with him on his journey to the bright orbs which it was a part of his early
religious fantasies to believe were swayed by Gods intermediate in the
scale of intelligent existence between ourselves and the "one Supreme, most
Perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves."[1]
It is, we repeat, the _Autobiography_ which is mainly responsible for the
unfavorable impressions that have been formed about the character of
Franklin. It is there that we learn what heady liquor his sprightly mind
and free spirit quaffed from the cup of boyhood and what errata blurred the
fair, fresh page of his early manhood. It is there that he has told us how,
as the result of his written attacks upon the Established Order, Puritan
Boston began to consider him in an unfavorable light "as a young genius
that had a turn for libelling and satyr"; how his indiscreet disputations
about religion caused him to be pointed at with horror by good people in
the same starch town as an infidel or atheist; how he availed himself of a
fraud in the second indentures of apprenticeship between his brother and
himself to claim his freedom before his time was up; how, in distant
London, he forgot the troth that he had plighted to Deborah Read; how he
attempted familiarities with the mistress of his friend Ralph which she
repulsed with a proper resentment; how he broke into the money which Mr.
Vernon had authorized him to collect; how he brought over Collins and Ralph
to his own free-thinking ways; how he became involved in some foolish
intrigues with low women which from the expense were rather more
prejudicial to him than to them. It is in the _Autobiography_ also that we
learn from him how he thought that the daughter of Mrs. Godfrey's relation
should bring him as his wife enough money to discharge the remainder of the
debt on his printing house even if her parents had to mortgage their house
in the loan office; how partly by sheer force and pinching economy and
partly by dexterity and finesse, sometimes verging upon cunning, he pushed
himself further and further along the road to fortune, and finally how he
was so successful with the help of his _Art of Virtue_, despite occasional
stumblings and slips, in realizing his dream of moral perfection as to be
able to write complacently upon the margin of the _Autobiography_, "nothing
so likely to make a man's fortune as virtue." It is things like these in
the _Autobiography_ that have tended to create in minds, which know
Franklin only in this narrative, the idea that he was a niggard, a squalid
utilitarian, and even a little of a rogue; though the same _Autobiography_
witnesses also that he was not so engrossed with his own selfish interests
as not to find time for the enlarged projects of public utility which to
this day render it almost impossible for us to think of Philadelphia
without recalling the figure of Franklin. _Si monumentum requiris
circumspice_, was the proud inscription placed over the grave of Sir
Christopher Wren in the city where his genius had designed so many
edifices. The same inscription might be aptly placed over the grave of
Franklin in Christ Church yard in the city where his public spirit and
wisdom laid the foundations of so much that has proved enduring.
There is unquestionably a shabby side to the _Autobiography_, despite the
inspiring sacrifice of his physical wants which Franklin made in his
boyhood to gratify his intellectual cravings, the high promptings which the
appetites and unregulated impulses of his unguarded youth were powerless to
stifle, the dauntless resolution and singleness of purpose with which he
defied and conquered his adverse star, the wise moderation of his hour of
victory, the disinterested and splendid forms of social service to which he
devoted his sagacious and fruitful mind, his manly hatred of injustice and
cruelty, his fidelity to the popular cause which neither flattery could
cajole nor power overawe. In its mixture of what is noble with what is
ignoble the _Autobiography_ reminds us of the merchandise sold at the new
printing-office near the Market in Philadelphia, where Franklin conducted
his business as a printer and a merchant, where his wife, Deborah, assisted
him by folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop and purchasing old
linen rags, and where his mother-in-law, Mrs. Read, compounded her
sovereign remedy against the itch and lice. Now it was a translation of
Cato's _Moral Distichs_ or a pamphlet against slavery fresh from his own
press, now it was a copy of some devotional or useful work which the last
packet had brought over from London, now it was a lot of goose feathers, or
old rags, or a likely young negro wench. But on the whole we cannot help
thinking that the calm view, which Franklin himself, in the cool of the
evening of his life, takes of the early part of his existence, was, with
some qualifications, not far wrong. Notwithstanding the dangerous season of
youth and the hazardous situations, in which he was sometimes placed among
strangers, when he was remote from the eye and advice of his sterling
father, Josiah Franklin, he believed, as we know from the _Autobiography_,
that he had not fallen into any "willful gross immorality or injustice";
and, start as the student of Franklin may at times at things which might
chill for the moment the enthusiasm of even such a Boswellian as the late
John Bigelow, to whose editorial services the reputation of Franklin is so
deeply indebted, he is likely in his final estimate to find himself in very
much the same mood as that which impelled Franklin in the _Autobiography_
to make the famous declaration, so true to his normal and intensely vital
nature, that, were it offered to his choice, he "should have no objection
to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the
advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the
first." Be this as it may, it is at least safe to say that it is very
unfair to judge the character of Franklin by the _Autobiography_ without
bearing in mind one of the leading motives by which he was induced to write
his own life. To his great honor it can be said that to do good in the
higher social sense, to promote the lasting interests of humanity, to free
the march of the race from every handicap, every impediment, whether
arising in or outside of ourselves, to instruct, to enlighten, were the
dominant incentives, the mellow, yet commanding passions of his existence.
Like many another philosopher before and since, in his zeal to subserve the
general interest he forgot himself. If other young men treading in his
footsteps could be deterred by the warnings of his errors from becoming
involved in the mistakes and moral lapses in which his youth and
inexperience were involved, he was willing, though not without some
misgivings, to lay before them and the whole world all the details of these
errors. In composing the _Autobiography_, he was influenced to no little
degree by the spirit of a man who bequeaths his own body to the surgeons
for the advancement of science. If his reputation suffered by his tender of
himself as a _corpus vile_ for the benefit of future generations, he was
prepared to take this risk, as he was prepared to take the risks of the two
electric shocks, which nearly cost him his life, in the promotion of human
knowledge. It is impossible for anyone, who is not familiar with the
perfect lack of selfish reserve brought by Franklin to the pursuit of truth
or the universal interests of mankind, to understand the extent to which,
in composing the _Autobiography_, he was moved by generous considerations
of this sort. In no other production of his did he show the same
disposition to turn the seamier side of his existence to the light for the
simple reason that no other production of his was written with the same
homiletic purpose as the _Autobiography_. And, if this purpose had not been
so strong upon him, how easy it would have been for him by a little
judicious suppression here and a few softening touches there to have
altered the whole face of the _Autobiography_, and to have rendered it as
faithless a transcript of the slips and blots of his life as are most
autobiographies of human beings--even those of men who have enjoyed a high
repute for moral excellence--in their relations to the indiscretions, the
follies and the transgressions of their immaturer years! At any rate, of
the offences of Franklin, mentioned in the _Autobiography_, may be said
what cannot be said of the similar offences of many men. He handsomely
atoned for them all so far as the opportunity to atone for them arose. It
was undoubtedly a serious breach of the moral law for him to have begotten
William Franklin out of lawful wedlock, and in the impartial affection,
which he publicly bestowed upon his illegitimate son and his legitimate
daughter, we see another illustration of his insensibility to the finer
inflections of human scruples. But when we see him accept this illegitimate
son as if he had come to him over his right shoulder instead of his left,
take him under his family roof, give him every advantage that education and
travel could confer, seek an honorable alliance for him, put him in the way
to become the Governor of Colonial New Jersey, even affectionately
recognize his illegitimate son as a grandson, we almost feel as if such
ingenuous naturalism had a kind of bastard moral value of its own.
The _Autobiography_ is interesting in every respect but in none more so
than in relation to the System of Morals adopted by Franklin for his
self-government in early life, when, to use his own words in that work, he
"conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection."
This project once formed, he went about its execution in a manner as
strictly mechanical as if he had been rectifying a smoky chimney or
devising a helpful pair of glasses for his defective eyesight. The virtues
were classified by him under thirteen heads: Temperance, Silence, Order,
Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation,
Cleanliness, Tranquillity, Chastity and Humility. These terms were all
tabulated by him in a little pocketbook kept for that especial purpose, and
to each virtue the close attention of a week was successively given by him.
If an offence was committed by him on a certain day, it was entered by a
little black mark under that date opposite the affronted virtue. The object
was to so concentrate his vigilance upon each virtue in turn and to so
strengthen his capacity to resist every temptation to violate it as to
finally render its practice habitual and instinctive. The plan in spirit
was not unlike the system of prudential algebra to which he told Joseph
Priestley, many years afterwards, that he resorted when his judgment was in
a state of uncertainty about some problem. In one column he would jot down
on a piece of paper all the _pros_ of the case, and in another all the
_cons_, and then, by appraising the relative value of each _pro_ and _con_
set down before his eye, and cancelling equivalent considerations, decide
upon which side the preponderance of the argument lay. Even Franklin
himself admits that his plan for making an automatic machine of virtue did
not work in every respect. Order he experienced extreme difficulty in
acquiring. Indeed, this virtue was so much against his grain that he felt
inclined to content himself with only a partial measure of fidelity to it,
like the man, he said in the _Autobiography_, who, though at first desirous
of having his whole ax bright, grew so tired of turning the grindstone on
which it was being polished that when the smith, who was holding it,
remarked that it was only speckled, and asked him to turn on, he replied,
"But I think I like a speckled ax best." The Humility, too, which Franklin
acquired, he was disposed to think was more specious than real. Pride, he
moralizes in the _Autobiography_, is perhaps the hardest of our natural
passions to subdue, and even, if he could conceive that he had completely
overcome it, he would probably, he thought, be proud of his humility. This
reminds us of his other observation in the _Autobiography_ that he gave
vanity fair quarter wherever he met with it, and that, in many cases, it
would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity
among the other comforts of life. In the effort, however, to acquire
Humility, Franklin did, he informs us in the same work, acquire, as time
wore on, the habit of expressing his opinions in such conciliatory forms
that no one perhaps for fifty years past had ever heard a dogmatic
expression escape him. "And to this habit (after my character of
integrity)," he declares, "I think it principally owing that I had early so
much weight with my fellow citizens when I proposed new institutions, or
alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils when I
became a member; for I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent, subject to
much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in language, and yet
I generally carried my points." On the whole, even though Franklin did find
Order and Humility not easy of attainment, he was very well satisfied with
the results of his plan for imparting the force of habit to virtue. In his
seventy-ninth year the former tradesman sat down to count deliberately his
moral gains. To his "little artifice" with the blessing of God he owed, he
felt, the constant felicity of his life until that time. To Temperance he
ascribed his long-continued health and what was still left to him of a good
constitution; to Industry and Frugality the early easiness of his
circumstances and the acquisition of his fortune with all that knowledge
that enabled him to be a useful citizen and obtained for him some degree
of reputation among the learned; to Sincerity and Justice the confidence of
his country and the honorable employs it conferred upon him; and to the
joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even in the imperfect
state that he was able to acquire them, all that evenness of temper and
that cheerfulness in conversation which made his company still sought for
and agreeable even to his younger acquaintance. From other expressions of
his in the _Autobiography_ we are left to infer that he believed that
Frugality and Industry, by freeing him from the residue of the debt on his
printing house and producing affluence and independence, had made more easy
the practice of sincerity and justice and the like by him.
So highly did Franklin esteem his method that he intended to follow it up
with a treatise, to be known as the _Art of Virtue_, containing a practical
commentary upon each of the virtues inserted in his little book, and
showing just how anyone could make himself virtuous, if he only had a mind
to. In this treatise, it was his desire, he says in the _Autobiography_, to
expound the doctrine that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are
forbidden but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone
considered, and that it is therefore to the interest of everyone to be
virtuous who wishes to be happy even in this world. "I should from this
circumstance," he said, "(there being always in the world a number of rich
merchants, nobility, states, and princes, who have need of honest
instruments for the management of their affairs, and such being so rare),
have endeavoured to convince young persons that no qualities were so likely
to make a poor man's fortune as those of probity and integrity." The
thought was more fully developed in a letter to Lord Kames, dated May 3,
1760.
I purpose likewise [he said], a little work for the
benefit of youth, to be called the _Art of Virtue_.
From the title I think you will hardly conjecture what
the nature of such a book may be. I must therefore
explain it a little. Many people lead bad lives that
would gladly lead good ones, but know not _how_ to make
the change. They have frequently _resolved_ and
_endeavoured_ it; but in vain, because their endeavours
have not been properly conducted. To expect people to
be good, to be just, to be temperate, &c., without
_shewing_ them _how_ they should _become_ so, seems
like the ineffectual charity mentioned by the Apostle,
which consisted in saying to the hungry, the cold, and
the naked, "Be ye fed, be ye warmed, be ye clothed,"
without shewing them how they should get food, fire, or
clothing.
Most people have naturally _some_ virtues, but none
have naturally _all_ the virtues. To _acquire_ those
that are wanting, and secure what we acquire, as well
as those we have naturally, is the subject of _an art_.
It is as properly an art as painting, navigation, or
architecture. If a man would become a painter,
navigator, or architect, it is not enough that he is
_advised_ to be one, that he is _convinced_ by the
arguments of his adviser, that it would be for his
advantage to be one, and that he resolves to be one,
but he must also be taught the principles of the art,
be shewn all the methods of working, and how to acquire
the habits of using properly all the instruments; and
thus regularly and gradually he arrives, by practice,
at some perfection in the art.
The virtue, which this new art was to fabricate, was obviously too much in
keeping with the national tendency to turn over tasks of every sort to
self-directed machinery. The _Art of Virtue_, however, was never actually
penned, owing to the demands of private and public business upon Franklin's
time, and the world was consequently left to get along as it best could
with virtue of the old impulsive and untutored type. We are also apprised
in the _Autobiography_ that the _Art of Virtue_ itself was to be but an
incident of a great and extensive project which likewise never reached
maturity for the same reasons that arrested the completion of that work.
This project was the formation of a United Party for Virtue, to be
composed of virtuous men of all nations under the government of suitable
good and wise rules. The conditions of initiation into this body, which was
to move on sin and debt throughout the world with embattled ranks and
flying banners, were to be the acceptance of Franklin's final religious
creed, of which we shall have something to say presently, and the
continuous practice for thirteen weeks of Franklin's moral regimen; and the
members were to engage to afford their advice, assistance and support to
each other in promoting one another's interests, business and advancement
in life. For distinction, the association was to be called The Society of
the Free and Easy, "free, as being, by the general practice and habit of
the virtues, free from the dominion of vice; and particularly by the
practice of industry and frugality, free from debt, which exposes a man to
confinement, and a species of slavery to his creditors." It is in the
_Autobiography_ also that Franklin states that he filled the spaces between
the remarkable days in the calendar in his _Poor Richard's Almanac_ with
proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality,
"as the means," he declared, "of procuring wealth, and thereby securing
virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want, to act always honestly,
as, to use here one of those proverbs, _it is hard for an empty sack to
stand upright_."[2]
This prudential view of morality also found utterance in other forms in the
writings of Franklin. In the first of the two graceful dialogues between
Philocles, the Man of Reason and Virtue, and Horatio, the Man of Pleasure,
which appeared in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, the former warns the latter
in honeyed words that he would lose even as a man of pleasure, if, in the
pursuit of pleasure, he did not practice self-denial, by taking as much
care of his future as his present happiness, and not building one upon the
ruins of the other; all of which, of course, was more epigrammatically
embodied in that other injunction of Poor Richard, "Deny self for self's
sake." No wonder that Horatio was so delighted with a theory of
self-denial, which left him still such a comfortable margin for sensual
enjoyment, that, when Philocles bids him good night, he replies: "Adieu!
thou enchanting Reasoner!"
"Money makes men virtuous, Virtue makes them happy"; this is perhaps an
unfair way of summarizing Franklin's moral precepts, but it is not remote
from fairness. "Truth and Sincerity," he had written in his _Journal of a
Voyage from London to Philadelphia_, when he was but twenty years of age,
"have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them, which cannot be
perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be
painted." It would have been well for the moralist of later years to have
remembered this statement when he made up his mind to contract the habit of
moral perfection. His Milton, from which he borrowed the _Hymn to the
Creator_ that is a part of his _Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_,
might have told him,
"Virtue could see to do what Virtue would
By her own radiant light, though sun and moon
Were in the flat sea sunk,"
or in those other words from the same strains of supernal melody,
"If Virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her."
In teaching and pursuing a system of morals, which was nothing but a scheme
of enlightened selfishness, dependent for its aliment upon pecuniary ease
and habit, he was simply faithful to a general conception of life and
character entirely too earthbound and grovelling to satisfy those higher
intuitions and ideals which, be the hard laws of our material being what
they may, not only never permit our grosser natures to be at peace, but
reject with utter disdain the suggestion that they and our vices and
infirmities are but offshoots of the same parent stock of selfishness. It
cannot be denied that, as a general rule, a man with some money is less
urgently solicited to commit certain breaches of the moral law than a man
with none, or that we should be in a bad way, indeed, if we did not have
the ply of habit as well as the whisper of conscience to assist us in the
struggle between good and evil that is ever going on in our own breasts.
But the limited freedom from temptation, secured by the possession of
money, and the additional capacity for resisting temptation, bred by good
habits, are, it is hardly necessary to say, foundations too frail to
support alone the moral order of the universe. Beyond money, however
conducive it may be in some respects to diminished temptation, there must
be something to sweeten the corrupting influence of money. Beyond good
habits, however desirable as aids to virtue, there must be something to
create and sustain good habits. This thing no merely politic sense of
moral necessity can ever be. Franklin's idea of supplying our languid moral
energies with a system of moral practice as material as a go-cart or a
swimming bladder is one, it is safe to say, upon which neither he nor
anyone else could build a character that would, as Charles Townsend might
have said, be anything but "a habit of lute string--a mere thing for summer
wear." His _Art of Virtue_ was a spurious, pinchbeck, shoddy substitute for
the real virtue which has its home in our uninstructed as well as our
instructed moral impulses; and for one man, who would be made virtuous by
it, ten, we dare say, would be likely to be made shallow formalists or
canting scamps. It is a pity that Poor Richard did not make more of that
other time-honored maxim, "Virtue is its own reward."
Indeed, we shrewdly suspect that even Franklin's idea that he was such a
debtor to his factitious system of moral practice was not much better than
a conceit. The improvement in his moral character, after he first began to
carry the virtues around in his pocket, is, we think, far more likely to
have been due to the natural decline of youthful waywardness and dissent,
the discipline of steady labor, the settling and sober effects of domestic
life and the wider vision in every respect in our relations to the world
which comes to us with our older years. It is but just to Franklin to say
that, even before he adopted his "little artifice," his character as
respects the virtues, which he specifically names as having had a hand in
producing the constant felicity of his life, namely, Temperance, Industry,
Frugality, Sincerity and Justice was, so far as Temperance, Industry and
Frugality were concerned, exceptionally good, and, so far as Sincerity and
Justice were concerned, not subject to any ineffaceable reproach. In truth,
even he, we imagine, would have admitted with a laugh, accompanied perhaps
by a humorous story, that the period of his life, before his dream of
moral perfection was formed, when he was so temperate as to be known to his
fellow printers in London as the "Water American," and to be able to turn
from the common diet to the vegetarian, and back again, without the
slightest inconvenience, would compare quite favorably with the period of
his life, after his dream of moral perfection had been formed, when he had
to confess on one occasion to Polly Stevenson that he had drunk more at a
venison feast than became a philosopher, and on another to his friend, John
Bartram that, if he could find in any Italian travels a recipe for making
Parmesan cheese, it would give him more satisfaction than a transcript of
any inscription from any old stone whatever. How far the effect of his
moral regimen was to strengthen the virtues of Silence, Resolution,
Moderation, Cleanliness and Tranquillity we lack sufficient materials for a
judgment. These, assuming that Cleanliness must have gone along with such
an eager propensity for swimming as his, were all native virtues of his
anyhow we should say. But as to Chastity the invigorating quality of the
regimen is certainly open to the most serious doubt. There is only too much
in the correspondence which has survived him to give color to the statement
of John Adams that even at the age of seventy-odd he had neither lost his
love of beauty nor his taste for it. When we bear this in mind and recall
what he had to say in the _Autobiography_ about the "hard-to-be-governed
passion of youth," which frequently hurried him into intrigues with low
women that fell in his way before he resolved to acquire the habit of
chastity with the aid of his book, we realize that the artificial
scaffolding, which he proposed to build up around his character, reasonably
enough broke down at just the point where the natural vigor of his
character was the weakest.
In point of sexual morality, Franklin was no better than the Europe of the
eighteenth century; distinctly worse than the America of that century. His
domestic affections were uncommonly strong, but the notable peculiarity
about his domestic life is that he was not a whit less soberly dutiful in
his irregular than in his regular family connections, and always acted as
if the nuptial ceremony was a wholly superfluous form, so far as a proper
sense of marital or paternal obligation, or the existence of deep,
unreserved affection, upon the part of a husband or father, went. His lack
of scruples in this respect almost reminds us of the question put by his
own Polly Baker, when she was prosecuted the fifth time for giving birth to
a bastard: "Can it be a crime (in the nature of things, I mean) to add to
the king's subjects, in a new country, that really wants people?"
Apparently no ceremony of any kind ever preceded his union with Deborah,
though accompanied by circumstances of cohabitation and acknowledgment
which unquestionably rendered it a valid, binding marriage, in every
respect, under the liberal laws of Pennsylvania. He simply remarks in the
_Autobiography_, "I took her to wife, September 1, 1730." The artlessness
with which he extended the full measure of a father's recognition to
William Franklin excited comment abroad as well as at home, and, together
with the political wounds inflicted by him upon the official arrogance and
social pride of the Proprietary Party in Pennsylvania, was mainly
responsible for the opprobrium in which his memory was held in the higher
social circles of Philadelphia long after his death. So far as we know,
there is nothing in his utterances or writings to indicate that the birth
of William Franklin ever caused him the slightest shame or embarrassment.
His dignity of character, in its way, it has been truly said by Sydney
George Fisher, was as natural and instinctive as that of Washington, and,
in its relations to illegitimacy, for which he was answerable, seems to
have felt the lack of conventional support as little as our first parents,
in their pristine state, did the lack of fig leaves. He accepted his
natural son and William Temple Franklin, William's natural son, exactly as
if both had come recommended to his outspoken affection by betrothal,
honest wedding ring and all. The idea that any stigma attached to either,
or that they stood upon any different footing from his legitimate daughter,
Sarah Bache and her children, was something that his mind does not appear
to have harbored at all. His attitude towards them was as unblushingly
natural and demonstrative, to get back to the Garden of Eden, as the mutual
caresses of Adam and Eve before the Fall of Man. William was born a few
months after the marriage of Franklin and Deborah, and his father, so far
as we can see, took him under his roof with as little constraint as if his
introduction had been duly provided for in the marriage contract. Indeed,
John Bigelow, who is always disposed, in the spirit of Franklin's own
limping lines on Deborah, to deem all his Joan's faults "exceedingly
small," rather ludicrously observes: "William may therefore be said to have
been born in wedlock, though he was not reputed to be the son of Mrs.
Franklin." So identified did he become with all the other members of
Franklin's household that Franklin in his letters not only frequently
conveyed "Billy's" duty to his "mother" and "Billy's" love to his "sister"
but on one occasion at least even "Billy's" duty to his "grandmother," Mrs.
Read, the mother of Mrs. Franklin. As the boy outgrew his pony, of which we
obtain a pleasant glimpse in a "lost" notice in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_,
we find Franklin in a letter to his own mother, Abiah Franklin, in which he
couples the name of "Billy" in the most natural way with that of his
daughter Sally, saying: "Will is now nineteen years of age, a tall proper
Youth, and much of a Beau." It was with William Franklin, when Governor of
New Jersey, that Sally took refuge at the time that her father's house in
Philadelphia was threatened with destruction by a Stamp Act mob; and it was
to him shortly afterwards, when the tide of popular approval was again
running in favor of Franklin, then the agent of Pennsylvania at London,
that she dispatched these joyful words: "Dear Brother:--_The Old Ticket
forever! We have it by 34 votes! God bless our worthy and noble agent, and
all his family!_" Through the influence of his father the son obtained a
provincial commission which brought him some military experience, and also
filled the office of Postmaster at Philadelphia, and afterwards the office
of Clerk of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania. He was with Franklin when
the latter sent his kite on its memorable flight into the skies; when he
visited Braddock's camp; and when he conducted his military expedition
against the murderous Indians. When Franklin sailed for England in 1757,
William accompanied him with the view of obtaining a license from the Inns
of Court, in which he had already been entered by the former, to practice
as a barrister. Abroad, he still remained his father's inseparable
companion, living with him, accompanying him in his travelling excursions,
attending him, when he was so signally honored at Cambridge and Oxford,
even poring with him over the parish records and gravestones at Ecton from
which Franklin sought to rescue such information as he could about his
humble ancestors, who could not have excited his curiosity more keenly, if
they had all been Princes of the Blood. What the two learned at Ecton of
the abilities and public spirit of Thomas, an uncle of Franklin, and a man
of no little local prominence, suggested such a close resemblance between
the uncle and nephew that William Franklin remarked: "Had he died on the
same day, one might have supposed a transmigration." Alexander Carlyle in
his _Autobiography_ has something to say about an occasion at Doctor
Robertson's house in Edinburgh when the pair as well as Hume, Dr. Cullen,
Adam Smith and others were present. The son, Carlyle tells us, "was open
and communicative, and pleased the company better than his father; and some
of us observed indications of that decided difference of opinion between
father and son which in the American War alienated them altogether." The
favorable impression made by William Franklin on this company at this
period of his life, he also made on William Strahan, of whom we shall have
much more to say. "Your son," Strahan wrote to Franklin's wife, "I really
think one of the prettiest young gentlemen I ever knew from America."
Indeed, even in extreme old age the handsome presence, courtly manners and
quick intelligence of William Franklin won their way at any social
gathering. Speaking of an occasion on which he had met him, Crabbe Robinson
says in his _Diary_, "Old General Franklin, son of the celebrated Benjamin
was of the party. He is eighty-four years of age, has a courtier-like mien,
and must have been a very fine man. He is now very animated and
interesting, but does not at all answer to the idea one would naturally
form of the son of the great Franklin."[3] A few days after the departure
of Franklin from England in August, 1762, the son was married to Miss
Elizabeth Downes, of St. James Street, "a very agreeable West India lady,"
if her father-in-law may be believed. Before the marriage took place, he
had been appointed, in the thirty-second year of his age, Governor of New
Jersey. If the appointment was made, as has been supposed, to detach
Franklin from the Colonial cause, it failed, of course, to produce any such
result, but it did have the effect of completely bringing over William
Franklin to the Loyalist side, when the storm finally broke, and Franklin
pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to the patriot cause. As
the Revolution drew on, William Franklin became a partisan of the British
Government, and, when he still held fast to his own office, in spite of the
dismissal of his father from his office as Deputy Postmaster-General for
the Colonies, Franklin wrote to him bluntly: "But you, who are a thorough
Courtier, see everything with Government Eyes." The son even disregarded
what was practically a request from the father that he should give up an
office, which was becoming more and more complicated with the arbitrary
measures of the English Ministry, and had been year after year a drain upon
the purse of the father. Then followed his ignominious arrest as a Tory by
the New Jersey Assembly, his defiant vaunt "_Pro Rege_ and Patria was the
motto I assumed, when I first commenced my political life, and I am
resolved to retain it till death shall put an end to my mortal existence,"
his breach with his father, his rancorous activity as the President of the
Board of Associated Loyalists, which drew down on him the suspicion of
having abetted at least one murderous outrage, and his subsequent
abandonment of America for England, where he died long after the war, a
pensioner of the British Crown. With the breach between father and son,
ended forever the visits that the members of the Franklin family in
Philadelphia had been in the habit of paying from time to time to the
Colonial Governor, the personal intercourse between the two, which, upon
the part of the father, we are told by William Strahan, was at once that of
a friend, a brother and an intimate and easy companion, and such filial
letters as the one, for example, in which William Franklin wrote to
Franklin that he was extremely obliged to him for his care in supplying him
with money, and should ever have a grateful sense of that with the other
numberless indulgences that he had received from his parental affection.
After the restoration of peace between the two waning countries, overtures
of reconciliation were made by William Franklin. "I ... am glad," his
father wrote, "to find that you desire to revive the affectionate
Intercourse, that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to
me; indeed nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen
Sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old Age by my only Son; and
not only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms against me, in a Cause,
wherein my good Fame, Fortune and Life were all at Stake." Then with an
uncertain touch of the native sense of justice, which was so deeply seated
in his breast, he continued: "I ought not to blame you for differing in
Sentiment with me in Public Affairs. We are Men, all subject to Errors. Our
Opinions are not in our own Power; they are form'd and govern'd much by
Circumstances, that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible.
Your Situation was such that few would have censured your remaining Neuter,
_tho' there are Natural Duties which precede political ones, and cannot be
extinguish'd by them_." Responding to a statement in this same letter that
the writer would be glad to see him when convenient, but would not have
him come to Paris at that time, William Franklin had a brief interview with
his father at Southampton, when the latter was returning, after the
restoration of peace between Great Britain and the United States, full of
gratified patriotism, as well as of years and infirmities, to the land from
which the son was an outcast. That immedicable wound, however, was not to
be healed by one or even by many interviews, and, while Franklin did
subsequently devise his lands in Nova Scotia to William Franklin and
release him from certain debts, he could not refrain from a bitter fling in
doing so. "The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public
notoriety," the will ran, "will account for my leaving him no more of an
estate he endeavoured to deprive me of."
Again that remorseless moral system, in comparison with which the flimsy
moral system of the _Autobiography_ is, to use Bismarck's figure, but a
lath painted to look like iron, had reminded one, who had had the temerity
to violate its ordinances, that what is now as luscious as locusts may
shortly be as bitter as coloquintida.
Surely there are few things in history more pathetic than that the
relationship, for which the father had set aside the world and the world's
law, and to which the incalculable workings of human love had almost
communicated the genuineness and dignity of moral legitimacy, should have
been the one thing to turn to ashes upon the lips of a life blessed with
prosperity and happiness almost beyond the measure of any that the past has
brought home to us![4]
It has been suggested that Franklin had another natural child in the wife
of John Foxcroft. In a letter to the former, Foxcroft acquaints him that
"his daughter" had been safely brought to bed, and had presented the writer
with a sweet little girl, and in several letters to Foxcroft Franklin
speaks of Mrs. Foxcroft as "my daughter." "God send my Daughter a good
time, and you a Good Boy," are the words of one of them. The suggestion has
been rejected by Albert Henry Smyth, the accomplished editor of Franklin's
writings, on chronological grounds which, it seems to us, are by no means
conclusive. The term, "daughter," however, standing alone, would certainly,
under any circumstances, be largely deprived of its significance by the
fact that Franklin, in his intercourse with other women than Mrs. Foxcroft,
seems in the course of his life to have been addressed, in both English and
French, by every paternal appellation from Pappy to _Tres cher Papa_ known
to the language of endearment.[5] Moreover, so singularly free from
self-consciousness was he in relation to his own sexual vagaries, so urgent
were his affectionate impulses, that it is hard to believe that he could
have been the father of such an illegitimate daughter when there is no
evidence to show that, aside from a little concession to the jealousy of
Mrs. Franklin, he treated her exactly as he did his acknowledged daughter,
Sally.
The unsophisticated relations of Franklin to William Franklin were also his
relations to William Temple Franklin, who was born in England, when his
father was in that country with Franklin during the latter's first mission
abroad. The mother of his father is unknown, and so is his own. Silence was
one of the virtues enjoined on Franklin by his little book, and was an
innate attribute of his strong character besides. The case was certainly
one, in which, if he had been reproached by his father, William Franklin
could have found an extenuating example very near at hand, even if not very
readily available for the purposes of recrimination. But there is nothing
to lead us to believe that Franklin was more concerned about the second bar
sinister in his coat of arms than the first. On the contrary, his affection
appropriated his little grandson with a promptitude which reminds us of the
story told in one of his letters to his wife about the boy who asked
another boy, when the latter was crying over a pennyworth of spilt vinegar,
for fear that his mother would whip him, "Have you then got ne'er a
Grandmother?" Almost, if not, from the very beginning, Franklin, and not
William, was Temple's real father, and, after William became estranged from
Franklin, the grandson thenceforth occupied the place in the heart of the
latter which the son had previously occupied, or one, if anything, even
warmer. When William was appointed Governor of New Jersey, and sailed away
with his bride to his province, Temple, then about two years old, was left
in London. As he grew older, he was placed by his grandfather, after the
return of the grandfather to England in 1764, in a school near London from
which he often came to visit the latter at Mrs. Stevenson's house at No. 7
Craven Street. After one of these visits, Franklin writes to William,
"Temple has been at home with us during the Christmas Vacation from School.
He improves continually, and more and more engages the Regard of all that
are acquainted with him, by his pleasing, sensible, manly Behaviour." On
another occasion, in settling an account with William Franklin he says
proudly, after referring to outlays required by the maintenance and
education of Temple, "But that his Friends will not grudge when they see
him." For a time, Temple was an inmate of the Craven Street House. When
Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1775, he took him with him, and turned
him over to William Franklin, whose family name the youth, until then known
as William Temple, assumed for the future. Temple, however, after spending
some happy months in New Jersey, was soon again with his grandfather at
Philadelphia for the purpose of attending the College of Philadelphia, and
here he was when Franklin was on the point of setting out on his mission to
France. When he did sail, Temple, then sixteen or seventeen years of age,
and Benjamin Franklin Bache, the oldest son of Franklin's daughter, Sally,
a boy of seven, accompanied him; it being the purpose of Franklin to place
Temple at some foreign university, with the design of ultimately making a
lawyer of him, and Benjamin at some school in Paris.[6] Governor Franklin,
who was a prisoner in Connecticut, did not hear of the departure of his
father until several weeks after the three had sailed. "If," he wrote to
his wife, "the old gentleman has taken the boy with him, I hope it is only
to put him into some foreign university."
Abroad, the idea of giving Temple a legal education was first deferred, and
then finally dismissed. His grandfather, with an infinite amount to do, and
with no clerical help provided by Congress to assist him in doing it, was
constrained to employ him as his private secretary, without any aid except
that of a French clerk, who was paid a salary of fifty louis per annum.
Engaging in person, endowed to some degree with the vivacity of his
grandfather and father, speaking French much better than his grandfather,
possessed of fair abilities and attentive to his duties, he appears to have
filled the post of secretary creditably, though Congress, for one reason or
another, could never be induced to recognize his appointment officially.
Later on, when John Adams, John Jay, Henry Laurens and Franklin were
appointed with Jefferson, who declined to serve, Commissioners to negotiate
peace with Great Britain, he became their Secretary at an annual salary of
one thousand pounds, but the vain, pathetic efforts of the grandfather,
both before and after his return to America from France, when too much time
had been lost for Temple to resume the thought of taking up the study of
law, to obtain some secondary diplomatic, or other, position in the public
service for the grandson, make up one of the despicable chapters in the
history of Congress. Remarkable as it now seems, at one time there was even
an effort on foot in America to oust Temple from his position as the
private secretary of Franklin. It called forth a remonstrance in a letter
from the latter to Richard Bache, his son-in-law, which is not only deeply
interesting because of its stirring, measured force of expression, but also
because of the tenderness for Temple which it manifests.
I am surprised to hear [he said] that my grandson,
Temple Franklin, being with me, should be an objection
against me, and that there is a cabal for removing him.
Methinks it is rather some merit, that I have rescued a
valuable young man from the danger of being a Tory, and
fixed him in honest republican Whig principles; as I
think, from the integrity of his disposition, his
industry, his early sagacity, and uncommon abilities
for business, he may in time become of great service to
his country. It is enough that I have lost my _son_;
would they add my _grandson_? An old man of seventy, I
undertook a winter voyage at the command of the
Congress, and for the public service, with no other
attendant to take care of me. I am continued here in a
foreign country, where, if I am sick, his filial
attention comforts me, and, if I die, I have a child to
close my eyes and take care of my remains. His dutiful
behaviour towards me, and his diligence and fidelity in
business, are both pleasing and useful to me.
The same indulgent estimate of Temple's capacity is also indicated in a
letter to Samuel Huntington in which Franklin requested Congress to take
his grandson under his protection. After stating that Temple seemed to be
qualified for public foreign affairs "by a sagacity and judgment above his
years, and great diligence and activity, exact probity, a genteel address,
a facility in speaking well the French tongue, and all the knowledge of
business to be obtained by a four years' constant employment in the
secretary's office," he added: "After all the allowance I am capable of
making for the partiality of a parent to his offspring, I cannot but think
he may in time make a very able foreign minister for Congress, in whose
service his fidelity may be relied on."
A thing most earnestly desired by Franklin was the marriage of Temple to a
daughter of Madame Brillon, who sometimes referred to Temple as "M.
Franklinet." So ardent was the chase upon his part that he even assured the
mother that he was ready to spend the rest of his life in France if the
only obstacle to the union was the fear that Temple would return to America
with him. Mademoiselle Brillon does not seem to have been inclined to let
Temple despair but her parents were unwilling to give their consent. Madame
Brillon declared that it would have been sweet to her heart and most
agreeable to M. Brillon to have been able to form a union which would have
made but one family of the Brillons and the Franklins, and that they liked
Temple, and believed that he had everything requisite to make a man
distinguished, and to render a woman happy, but they must have, she said, a
son-in-law who would be in a situation to succeed her husband in his
office, and who was also a man of their religion. This was in reply to a
letter from Franklin in which he proposed the match, and had said of
Temple, "He is still young, and perhaps the partiality of a father has made
me think too highly of him, but it seems to me that he has the stuff in him
to make in time a distinguished man." After reading the letters from
Franklin about his grandson, we can readily believe that Lafayette did not
exaggerate when he wrote to Washington that Franklin loved his grandchild
better than anything else in the world. Even when Temple was some
twenty-four years of age, Franklin in one of his letters addresses him as
"My Dear Child" and signs himself, "Your loving Grandfather." While the two
remained in France, the old man improved every opportunity to advance the
fortunes of the younger one, matrimonial or otherwise. When his legs grew
too gouty to enable him to keep pace in mounting the stairways at
Versailles with the other foreign ministers, it was by Temple that he was
represented at Court _levees_. By him Temple was also introduced to
Voltaire, and enjoyed the unusual honor of having that great man with an
expressive gesture say to him: "My child, God and Liberty! Recollect those
two words." To Temple, too, was delegated by our envoys the office of
handing to Vergennes the memorial proposing an alliance between France,
Spain and the United States, and it was he who actually delivered to
Lafayette, on behalf of his grandfather, the handsome sword with which
Congress had honored the former. When the olive branch extended by William
Franklin to Franklin was accepted by him, Temple was sent over by him to
William in England for a season as the best peace-offering in the gift of
the sender. "I send your Son over to pay his Duty to you," he wrote to
William. "You will find him much improv'd. He is greatly esteem'd and
belov'd in this Country, and will make his Way anywhere." A letter written
to Temple, during his absence on this occasion, by his grandfather, in
which his grandfather pathetically complains of his silence, is another
minor proof of the devotion felt by Franklin for Temple. And there is every
reason to believe that the feeling was fully returned; for even the
prospect of being united to the daughter of Madame Brillon, with the full
sanction of his grandfather, was not sufficient to reconcile Temple to the
thought of being left behind in France by him. So far from being heeded by
Congress was the request of Franklin that some public office be conferred
upon Temple that the latter was even displaced in his secretaryship by
another person without a line of notice from Congress to his grandfather.
And when the two arrived in America, after they had lingered long enough at
Southampton for William Franklin to transfer to his son a farm of some six
hundred acres at Rancocas, in the State of New Jersey, purchased for Temple
by Franklin, Temple fared no better at the hands of the American Government
than in France. His efforts, first, to secure the Secretaryship of the
Federal Convention of 1787, and, afterwards, to obtain some appointment
under the administration of Washington, met with no success, despite all
that his grandfather could do for him. For a while he lived on his _Terre_,
as Franklin called it, at Rancocas, but, after the death of Franklin, who
did not forget him in his will, he became restless, and wandered back to
the Old World, where he delayed so long the publication of his
grandfather's writings, bequeathed to him by the latter, that he was
strongly but unjustly suspected for a time of having been bribed by the
British Government to suppress them. His slender literary qualifications
for giving the proper perspective to such a mass of material had simply
stood appalled at the magnitude of their task.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The superlative eulogy of Franklin is that of Josiah Quincy, Junior,
who expressed his conviction in his journal that Franklin was one of the
wisest and best of men upon earth; one, of whom it might be said that this
world was not worthy. Of course, no man capable of creating such a
conviction as this was safe from "the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass'
hoof." Capefigue in his _Memoirs of Louis XVI._ called Franklin "one of the
great charlatans" of his age. This is the language of a man who finds a
phrase and thinks he has found a fact. Arthur Lee said on one occasion that
Franklin was "the meanest of all mean men, the most corrupt of all corrupt
men"; but this was merely the froth of a rabid mental condition. Stephen
Sayre wrote to Capellen that Franklin was a "great villain," but Sayre had
unsuccessfully solicited office from Franklin. Besides, this extraordinary
character seems to have nearly, if not quite, answered Franklin's
description of a man who has neither good sense enough to be an honest man
nor wit enough for a rogue. The only one of Franklin's slanderers whose
arrow hit anywhere near the mark was an anonymous French poet who termed
him "Cameleon Octogenaire."
[2] Franklin was as fearless in applying his ethical principles to himself
as to others. After telling his sister Jane in a letter, dated Dec. 30,
1770, that he trusted that no apprehension of removal from his office as
Postmaster would make the least alteration in his political conduct, he
uses these striking words: "My rule, in which I have always found
satisfaction, is, never to turn aside in public affairs through views of
private interest; but to go straight forward in doing what appears to me
right at the time, leaving the consequences with Providence. What in my
younger days enabled me more easily to walk upright, was, that I had a
trade, and that I knew I could live upon little; and thence (never having
had views of making a fortune) I was free from avarice, and contented with
the plentiful supplies my business afforded me. And now it is still more
easy for me to preserve my freedom and integrity, when I consider that I am
almost at the end of my journey, and therefore need less to complete the
expense of it; and that what I now possess, through the blessing of God,
may, with tolerable economy, be sufficient for me (great misfortunes
excepted), though I should add nothing more to it by any office or
employment whatsoever."
[3] In a paper on William Franklin, read before the New Jersey Historical
Society on Sept. 27, 1848, William A. Whitehead sketches him in this
manner: "He was of a cheerful, facetious disposition; could narrate well
entertaining stories to please his friends; was engaging in his manners,
and possessed good conversational powers. He lived in the recollection of
those who saw him in New Jersey as a man of strong passions, fond of
convivial pleasures, well versed in the ways of the world, and, at one
period of his life not a stranger to the gallantries which so frequently
marred the character of the man of that age. He was above the common size,
remarkably handsome, strong and athletic, though subject to gout towards
the close of his life." His writings, Whitehead thought, though perhaps
less remarkable than might be expected from his advantages of education and
association, gave evidence of literary attainments which compared favorably
with those of most of the prominent men of that day in the Colonies. If
_The Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania
from its Origin_ is one of them, as has been supposed, we can only say that
it at least hardly deserves such praise. The unassimilated material
scattered through its pages reminds us of nothing so much as feather
pellets and fragments of bone that have passed unchanged through the
gastric tract of a hawk.
[4] The judgment of Franklin himself as to how far his life had been a
fortunate one was freely expressed in a letter to his friend John Sargent,
dated Jan. 27, 1783. "Mrs. Sargent and the good Lady, her Mother," he said,
"are very kind in wishing me more happy Years. I ought to be satisfy'd with
those Providence has already been pleas'd to afford me, being now in my
seventy-eighth; a long Life to pass without any uncommon Misfortune, the
greater part of it in Health and Vigor of Mind and Body, near Fifty Years
of it in continu'd Possession of the Confidence of my Country, in public
Employments, and enjoying the Esteem and affectionate, friendly Regard of
many wise and good Men and Women, in every Country where I have resided.
For these Mercies and Blessings I desire to be thankful to God, whose
Protection I have hitherto had, and I hope for its Continuance to the End,
which now cannot be far distant."
[5] For instance, in a letter to Elizabeth Partridge Franklin signs himself
"Your affectionate Papah," and in a letter to Madam Conway, "Your
affectionate Father (as you do me the Honor to call me)," and in a letter
to Miss Flainville, "Your loving Papa."
[6] In a letter from Paris to Jan Ingenhousz, dated Apr. 26, 1777, Franklin
told Ingenhousz that he had brought Temple with him from America "partly to
finish his Education, having a great Affection for him, and partly to have
his Assistance as a Secretary."
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_!"
CHAPTER III
Franklin, the Philanthropist and Citizen
It may be that, if Franklin had asked the angel, who made the room of Abou
Ben Adhem rich, and like a lily in bloom, whether his name was among the
names of those who loved the Lord, the angel might have replied: "Nay not
so"; but there can be no question that like Ben Adhem Franklin could with
good right have added,
"I pray thee then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men."
As we have said, the desire to promote the welfare of his fellow-creatures
was the real religion of his life--a zealous, constant religion which began
with his early manhood and ceased only with his end. This fact reveals
itself characteristically in a letter written by him to his wife just after
he had narrowly escaped shipwreck off Falmouth Harbor on his second voyage
to England. "Were I a Roman Catholic," he said, "perhaps I should on this
occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to
vow at all, it should be to build a _light house_."
The weaker side of human character was, in all its aspects, manifest enough
to his humorous perceptions. In an amusing paragraph in the
_Autobiography_, he tells us how once in his youth he irresolutely adhered
to his vegetarian scruples, even when his nose was filled with the sweet
savor of frying fish, until he recollected that he had seen some smaller
fish removed from their stomachs. Then thought he, "If you eat one another,
I don't see why we mayn't eat you." "So convenient a thing," he adds, "it
is to be a _reasonable creature_, since it enables one to find or make a
reason for everything one has a mind to do." On another occasion, he was so
disgusted with the workings of human reason as to regret that we had not
been furnis
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