Among the books which Franklin had read in Boston were Shaftesbury and Collins, representative deistical writers of the time, and he had been led by them, as he says, to doubt "many points of our religious doctrines." Now there are in religion two elements quite distinct and at times even antagonistic, though by the ordinary mind they are commonly seen as blended together. These are the emotional and the moral natures. In many religious ceremonies of the Orient, religion is purely an emotion, an exaltation of the nerves, accompanied at times by outbreaking immorality; and unfortunately the same phenomena have been too often seen in our own land. This emotional element is always connected with the imagination and with belief in some form of revelation. The other element of religion is the law of morality which has been taught the world over by true philosophers, and which depends at last on the simple feeling that a man should to a certain varying extent sacrifice his personal advantage for the good of the community. Now the deists of the eighteenth century, of whom Voltaire was the great champion, denied revelation and sought to banish the emotions from religion. They believed in a God who manifested himself in the splendid pageantry of nature, and this they called natural revelation. They laid especial emphasis on morality, but in their attempt to sever morals from enthusiasm (_enthousiasmos_, god-in-us) they too often reduced human life to a barren formula. From this brief account it will be seen how naturally Franklin, with his parentage and particular genius, fell a prey to the teachings of Shaftesbury.