[Footnote i-436: In Franklin's liturgy of the '30's (in the _Autobiography_) he quotes from Thomson's _Winter_ (lines 217 ff.). While the references to Thomson are few in the complete works, his later influence on Franklin need not be underestimated. See Franklin's letter to W. Strahan (_Writings_, II, 242-3) in which he confesses that "That charming Poet has brought more Tears of Pleasure into my Eyes than all I ever read before." It is not inconceivable that in Thomson Franklin found additional sanction for his humanitarian bias. One remembers the wide differences between the humanitarianism of Thomson and Franklin. Franklin's practical and masculine-humanitarianism keyed to the saving of time and energy was unlike the sentimental warmheartedness often displayed by Thomson. Franklin was never moved to tears at beholding the worm's "convulsive twist in agonizing folds."] [Footnote i-437: Phillips Russell has suggested _Spectator_, No. 183, as Franklin's probable source in Part II of the _Dissertation_. There, pleasure and pain are "such constant yoke-fellows." This intuitive assertion can hardly be conceived as the elaborate metaphysical rationale upon which this idea rests in Franklin's work.] [Footnote i-438: Robertson, _op. cit._, 239-40.] [Footnote i-439: London (4th ed.), 1724. A despiser of authoritarianism in religion, intrigued by the physico-deistic thought of his day, Lyons (with a vituperative force akin to Thomas Paine's) damns those who damn men for revolting against divine and absolute revelation (p. 25). "Men have _Reason_ sufficient to find out proper and regular ways for improving and perfecting their laws." Faith he calls "an unintelligible Chymæra of the Phantasie" (p. 92). The doctrine of the Trinity "is one of the most nice Inventions that ever the subtlest Virtuoso constru'd to puzzle the Wit of Man with" (p. 112). Through faith people make of God "only a confus'd unintelligible Description of a _Heterogeneous Monster_ of their own Making" (p. 117). Deistically he opines that "we shall soon see that the Object of _True Religion_, and all Rational Mens Speculations, is an Eternal, Unchangeable, Omnipotent Being, infinitely Good, Just and Wise" (p. 123). Like Toland he urges, "To pretend to Believe a Thing or the Working of a Miracle, is a stupid and gaping Astonishment" (p. 195). Although he enjoyed Franklin's dissertation, he does not in his work hold to Franklin's necessitarianism: "Nothing interrupts Men, but only as they interrupt one another" (p. 238). Religion to Lyons is remote from books, but is found in the "unalterable laws of Nature, which no Authority can destroy, or Interpolator corrupt" (p. 252).]