Benjamin Franklin: Self-Revealed, Volume 1 — Chapter 2, Franklin's Religious Beliefs, Part 1

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 Æsop 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.

Montrésor who is very sick, tells his curé 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 Montrésor, "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 Montrésor 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.'

"