After a little while, however, he began to notice that certain of his friends who protested most loudly against religion were quite untrustworthy in their morals as well. Moreover he attributed several _errata_ of his own early life to lack of religious principles, and to remedy this defect he now undertook--deliberately if we may credit his later confessions--to build up a religion of his own. There is, one must acknowledge, something grotesque in this endeavor to supply the warmth of the emotional imagination by the use of cold reason, and had Franklin possessed less wit and more humor he would never have fallen into such bathos. The little book still exists in which Franklin wrote out his creed and private liturgy. The creed expresses a belief in "one Supreme, most perfect Being, Author and Father of the gods themselves." Finding this God to be infinitely above man's comprehension, our religionist goes on to say: "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.... It may be 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." Thereupon follows the form of adoration, or liturgy, including an invocation, psalm, indication of philosophic reading to take the place of the lessons, singing of the Hymn to the Creator from Milton's Paradise Lost, and litany. The whole is not without elevation, and the litany, composed as it is by a young man of twenty-two, touches one with a feeling almost of pathos for its true humility and reaching out after virtue.