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

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 _protégé_ 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.