Читать книгу Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature - Charles C. Bombaugh - Страница 32

Table of Contents

Benjamin Franklin is probably the best specimen that history affords of what is called a self-made man. He certainly “never worshipped his maker,” according to a stinging epigram, but was throughout his life, though always self-respectful, never self-conceited. Perhaps the most notable result of his self-education was the ease with which he accosted all grades and classes of men on a level of equality. The printer’s boy became, in his old age, one of the most popular men in the French Court, not only among its statesmen, but among its frivolous nobles and their wives. He ever estimated men at their true worth or worthlessness; but as a diplomatist he was a marvel of sagacity. The same ease of manner which recommended him to a Pennsylvania farmer was preserved in a conference with a statesman or a king. He ever kept his end in view in all his complaisances, and that end was always patriotic. When he returned to his country he was among the most earnest to organize the liberty he had done so much to achieve; and he also showed his hostility to the system of negro slavery with which the United States was burdened. At the ripe age of eighty-four he died, leaving behind him a record of extraordinary faithfulness in the performance of all the duties of life. His sagacity, when his whole career is surveyed, was of the most exalted character, for it was uniformly devoted to the accomplishment of great public ends of policy or beneficence.

During a part of his reign, George III. was in the habit of keeping a note-book, in which he jotted down his observations of men and passing events. In the volume dated 1778, among the names to which the king attached illustrative quotations, was the name of Benjamin Franklin, with the following passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar, ii. 1:

O let us have him; for his silver hairs

Will purchase us a good opinion,

And buy men’s voices to commend our deeds:

It shall be said his judgment ruled our hands;

Our youths and wildness shall no whit appear,

But all be buried in his gravity.

With regard to the charge frequently made against him of scepticism and infidel leanings, Franklin’s own refutation should suffice. In a letter written in 1784 to his friend William Strahan, in England, he said, referring to the successful outcome of the Revolutionary struggle,—

“I am too well acquainted with all the springs and levers of our machine not to see that our human means were unequal to our understanding, and that, if it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined. If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a Deity. It is He that abases the proud and favors the humble. May we never forget His goodness to us, and may our future conduct manifest our gratitude!”

In a letter to Whitefield, written shortly before his death, he said,—

“I am now in my eighty-fifth year and very infirm. Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That He governs by His Providence. That He ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we can render Him is by doing good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting his conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion.”

Add to such testimony the closing lines of his famous self-written epitaph: “The work itself shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the Author.”