Many and many of the simplest episodes reveal how shrewd, penetrating, and, above all, how clear headed he invariably was. Such, for example, was the hour when he was listening to the great evangelist, Whitefield, and while all his other auditors were being thrilled by the speaker's eloquence, Franklin was backing away from him step by step, in order to estimate how far his voice would carry, and thus to verify the newspaper accounts of his having preached to twenty-five thousand people in the fields. Franklin went away full of admiration for the preacher's voice, but with no word of comment on his sermon. He went often to hear Whitefield, but always as a very human public speaker and never as a "divine." A biographer, even one of his associates, could not have known many of the intimate facts that Franklin included, and he would almost surely have left out other details as irrelevant or impertinent. Franklin himself, in contrast, wrote the things which still clung in his old man's memory and which must have been important in his development, or he would have forgotten them. Another striking feature of the "Autobiography" is its honesty, for he did not hesitate to record happenings which revealed defects in his character--defects which nine out of ten admiring biographers would have been inclined to omit or even actually to cover up. Franklin knew that his life had not been all admirable, that many times it had not been above reproach; but, all things considered, he was willing to let it stand for what it was. In consequence, if one reads his story as honestly as Franklin wrote it,--and few people do,--it will appear that not only was he disorderly and unmethodical but that he was not always truthful, that he was sometimes unscrupulous in business, and that he was at times self-indulgent and immoral. In fact too often the editing of Franklin's life-story seems to have been done on the principle laid down by Dr. Samuel Johnson about Chesterfield's "Letters to his Son"--that they should be put into the hands of every young man after the immorality had been taken out of them. This is not honest teaching and does not lead to honest habits of study. The truth is that Franklin was like other people in being a combination of virtues and defects. He was unlike other people in having extraordinary talents and virtues and in owning up to his defects. For the two great "errata" of his life--the use of money intrusted to him for Mr. Vernon and his unfaithfulness while in London to Miss Read, his betrothed--he afterward made the fullest possible atonement. In his glorification of usefulness at every turn he was at once the greatest expounder and the greatest example of his century. He made a religion of usefulness, putting it into a simple creed which gives less heed to the spirit of worship than many of us need, but far more to the spirit of service than most of us follow: It is expressed in these words, viz.: