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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.'"

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,

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 —

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,

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.

'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 Vitæ."

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.