[1] Sparks’ Life and Works of Franklin, Vol. 6, p. 291.

[2] This volume has been republished by the Mass. S. S. Society.

[3] Works of Dr. Franklin by W. Temple Franklin. Vol. I, p. 447.

[4] “For some years he wandered in heathenish darkness. He forsook the safe and good though narrow way of his forefathers, and of his father and mother, and his gentle Uncle Benjamin, without finding better and larger ways of his own. He was in danger of becoming a castaway or a commonplace successful man of the world. He found in due time, after many trials, and much suffering and many grievous errors, that the soul of a man does not thrive upon negations, and that, in very truth a man must believe in order that he may be saved.”—Parton’s Life of Franklin, Vol. I, p. 71.

[5] The intelligent reader will recall the glowing version of this Psalm, by Steinhold.

[6] We both of us happen to know, as well as the stationer, that Riddlesden, the attorney, was a very knave. He had half ruined Miss Read’s father by persuading him to be bound for him. By his letter it appeared there was a secret scheme on foot to the prejudice of Mr. Hamilton; that Keith was concerned in it with Riddlesden.—Works of Franklin, by Sparks, Vol. i, p. 55.

[7] In this extraordinary document our young deist writes, “There is said to be a first mover, who is called God, who is all wise, all good, all powerful. If he is all good, whatsoever he doeth must be good. If he is all wise, whatever he doeth must be wise. That there are things to which we give the name of Evil, is not to be denied—such as theft, murder, etc. But these are not in reality evils. To suppose anything to exist or to be done contrary to the will of the Almighty is to suppose him not Almighty. There is nothing done but God either does or permits. Though a creature may do many actions, which, by his fellow creatures, will be named evil, yet he can not act what will be in itself displeasing to God.

“We will sum up the argument thus, When the Creator first designed the universe, either it was his will that all should exist and be in the manner they are at this time, or it was his will that they should be otherwise. To say it was His will things should be otherwise, is to say that somewhat hath contradicted His will; which is impossible. Therefore we must allow that all things exist now in a manner agreeable to His will; and, in consequence of that, all are equally good and therefore equally esteemed by Him. No condition of life or being is better or preferable to another.”

This whole treatise may be found in the appendix to the first volume of Parton’s Life of Franklin.

[8] Franklin writes in his autobiography, “I grew fond of her company, and being at that time under no religious restraint, and taking advantage of my importance to her, I attempted to take some liberties with her, another erratum, which she repulsed with a proper degree of resentment. She wrote to Ralph and acquainted him with my conduct. This occasioned a breach between us; and when he returned to London, he let me know he considered all the obligations he had been under to me as annulled.”—Works of Franklin, Vol. i, p. 59.

[9] “On one of these days I was, to my surprise, sent for by a great man I knew only by name, Sir William Wyndham. He had heard of my swimming from Chelsea to Blackfriars and of my teaching Wygate and another young man to swim in a few hours. He had two sons about to set out on their travels. He wished to have them first taught swimming, and proposed to gratify me handsomely if I would teach them. They were not yet come to town, and my stay was uncertain, so I could not undertake it. But from the incident I thought it likely that if I were to remain in England and opened a swimming-school I might get a good deal of money. And it struck me so strongly that had the overture been made me sooner, probably I should not so soon have returned to America.”—Autobiography, Vol. I. p. 66.

[10] Parton’s Life of Franklin, Vol. I, p. 168.

[11] “My arguments perverted some others, especially Collins and Ralph. But each of these having wronged me greatly without the least compunction; and recollecting Keith’s conduct towards me, who was another Free-thinker, and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful. My London pamphlet, printed in 1725, and which had for its motto,

“‘Whatever is is right,’

and which from the attributes of God, His infinite wisdom, goodness and power, concluded that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions, no such things existing, appeared now not so clever a performance, as I once thought it; and I doubted whether some error had not insinuated itself unperceived into my argument.”

In the year 1779, Dr. Franklin wrote to Dr. Benjamin Vaughn respecting this pamphlet.

“There were only one hundred copies printed, of which I gave a few to friends. Afterwards, disliking the piece, I burnt the rest, except one copy. I was not nineteen years of age when it was written. In 1730, I wrote a piece on the other side of the question, which began with laying for its foundation that almost all men, in all ages and countries, have at times made use of prayer.

“Thence I reasoned that if all things are ordained, prayer must be among the rest ordained; but as prayer can procure no change in things that are ordained, praying must then be useless and an absurdity. God would, therefore, not ordain praying if everything else was ordained. But praying exists, therefore all other things are not ordained. This manuscript was never printed. The great uncertainty I found in metaphysical reasoning disgusted me, and I quitted that kind of reading and study for others more satisfactory.”—Autobiography, p. 76.

[12] This pamphlet may be found in Sparks’ “Works of Franklin,” Vol. ii, p. 253.

[13] Life of Franklin, by Sparks, p. 102.

[14] “No other British colony admits of the evidence of an Indian against a white man; nor are the complaints of Indians against white men duly regarded in other colonies; whereby these poor people endure the most cruel treatment from the very worst of our own people, without hope of redress. And all the Indian wars in our colonies were occasioned by such means.”

Importance of the British Plantations in America to these Kingdoms, London. 1731.

[15] Life and Works of John Adams, Vol. ii, p. 165.

[16] “And now after the lapse of one hundred and thirty years, we find persons willing to give twenty-five dollars for a single number, and several hundred dollars for a complete set. Nay, the reading matter of several of the numbers, has been republished within these few years, and that republication already begins to command the price of a rarity.”—Parton’s Life of Franklin, Vol. i, p. 231.

[17] “Poor Richard, at this day, would be reckoned an indecent production. All great humorists were all indecent, before Charles Dickens. They used certain words which are now never pronounced by polite persons, and are never printed by respectable printers; and they referred freely to certain subjects which are familiar to every living creature, but which it is now agreed among civilized beings, shall not be topics of conversation. In this respect Poor Richard was no worse, and not much better than other colonial periodicals, some of which contain things incredibly obscene, as much so as the strongest passages of Sterne, Smollet and De Foe.”—Parton.

[18] “It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time. As I knew, or thought I knew what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found that I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined.”—Autobiography, p. 105.

[19] “Autobiography of Franklin,” as given by Sparks, p. 139.

[20] Franklin was then 53 years of age.

[21] Wilson’s Life of Bishop White, p. 89.

[22] Mr. Parton, in his excellent Life of Franklin, one of the best biographies which was ever written, objects to this withholding of the Christian name from Dr. Franklin. He writes,

[23] “For dinner parties Franklin was in such demand that, during the London season, he sometimes dined out six days in the week for several weeks together. He also confesses that occasionally he drank more wine than became a philosopher. It would indeed have been extremely difficult to avoid it, in that soaking age, when a man’s force was reckoned by the number of bottles he could empty.”—Parton’s Life of Franklin, Vol. i, p. 540.

As an illustration of the state of the times, I give the following verse from one of the songs which Franklin wrote, and which he was accustomed to sing with great applause. At the meetings of the Junto, all the club joined in the chorus,

“It is well,” Mr. Parton writes, “for us, in these days, to consider the spectacle of this large, robust soul, sporting in this simple, homely way. This superb Franklin of ours, who spent some evenings in mere jollity, passed nearly all his days in labor most fruitful of benefit to his country.”—Life of Franklin, Vol. i, p. 262.

[24] It may be worthy of record, that Wedderburn became the hero of the clubs and the favorite of the Tory party. Wealth and honors were lavished upon him. He rose to the dignity of an earl and lord chancellor, and yet we do not find, in any of the annals of those days, that he is spoken of otherwise than as a shallow, unprincipled man. When his death, after a few hours’ illness, was announced to the king, he scornfully said, “He has not left a worse man behind him.”

[25] “And here perhaps we have one of the reasons why Dr. Franklin, who was universally confessed to be the ablest pen in America, was not always asked to write the great documents of the Revolution. He would have put a joke into the Declaration of Independence, if it had fallen to him to write it. At this time he was a humorist of fifty years standing, and had become fixed in the habit of illustrating great truths by grotesque and familiar similes. His jokes, the circulating medium of Congress, were as helpful to the cause, as Jay’s conscience or Adams’ fire; they restored good humor, and relieved the tedium of delay, but were out of place in formal, exact and authoritative papers.”—Parton’s Franklin, Vol. 2. p. 85.

[26] Upon the overthrow of the royalist cause, Governor Franklin with other Tories went to England. Government gave him outright eighteen hundred pounds, and settled upon him a pension of eight hundred pounds a year. After the lapse of ten years he sought reconciliation with with his father. He lived to the age of eighty-two and died in London, in 1813.

[27] In the year 1780, Mr. Henry Laurens, formerly President of Congress, was sent as ambassador to Holland. The ship was captured off Newfoundland, after a chase of five hours. The unfortunate man was thrown into the Tower, where he was imprisoned fifteen months, “where” he wrote to Mr. Burke, “I suffered under a degree of rigor, almost if not altogether unexampled in modern British history.”

[28] This anecdote has had a wide circulation in the newspapers. Mr. William Cobbett inserts it in his “Works,” with the following comment, characteristic of the spirit of most of the higher class of Englishmen, in those days:

[29] Works of John Adams, Vol. III, p. 220.

[30] This is a delicate subject, but it must not be ignored. Mr. Parton writes,—“One penny-a-liner informed the public that Dr. Franklin had a son, who, though illegitimate, was a much more honest man than his father. As to the mother of that son, nothing was known of her, except that her seducer let her die in the streets.”

There was no end to those attacks. They were attended by every exaggeration of malignity which hatred could engender. It is certain that Franklin would have been saved from these woes could he, as a young man, have embraced the faith of the religion of Jesus, and developed that faith in his practice.

[31] The wonderful achievements of this patriot are fully recorded in one of the volumes of this series.

[32] In reference to the promises contained in the letter, Franklin referred to a book which it was said George III. had carefully studied, called Arcana Imperii. A prince, to appease a revolt, had promised indemnity to the revolters. The question was submitted to the keepers of the king’s conscience, whether he were bound to keep his promises. The reply was,

“No! It was right to make the promises, because the revolt could not otherwise be suppressed. It would be wrong to keep them, because revolters ought to be punished.”

[33] Sparks’ Franklin, Vol. iii, p. 278.

[34] Mr. Jefferson, after an intimacy of seven months with John Adams, in Paris, wrote of him: “He is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being who made him.”

[35] Edmund Burke wrote to Dr. Franklin that “The motion was the declaration of two hundred and thirty four members; but it was the opinion, he thought, of the whole house.”

[36] Mr. Adams wrote, in his diary, November, 1782, “Mr. Jay don’t like any Frenchman. The Marquis de la Fayette is clever, but he is a Frenchman.”

[37] Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, V. viii, p. 209.

[38] Contemplate the still greater blunder of our civil war. It was forced upon the nation by the slave traders, that they might perpetuate slavery. And now after the infliction of woes which no finite imagination can gauge, these very slave-holders declare with one voice, that nothing would induce them to reinstate the execrable institution. How much misery would have been averted, and what a comparative paradise would our southern country now have been, if before, instead of after the war, the oppressed had been allowed to go free!

[39] Mr. Parton undoubtedly suggested the true reason for this strange refusal to seek divine guidance. He writes,

[40] This reminds us of the exclamation of the Emperor Titus, who, at the close of a day in which he could not perceive that he had done any good, exclaimed, sadly, “Perdidi Diem.” I have lost a day. Beautifully has the sentiment been expressed in the words, which it would be well for all to treasure up,