To what extent did Franklin's nascent humanitarianism--mildly provoked by the neighborliness of Mather and Defoe--receive additional sanction from Shaftesbury's doctrine that "compassion is the supreme form of moral beauty, the neglect of it the greatest of all offenses against nature's ordained harmony"?[i-410] Identifying self-love and social, Shaftesbury saw the divine temper achieved through affection for the public, the "universal good."[i-411] Born among men who were convinced of the supremacy of scripture, Franklin would at first be astonished (then perhaps liberated) upon reading in the _Characteristics_ that "Religion excludes only perfect atheism."[i-412] From such a piece as Shaftesbury's _An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit_ Franklin learned that not all men preserved a union between theology and ethics, scripture and religion. Although Shaftesbury occasionally indicated a reverence for sacred scriptures, the totality of his thought was cast in behalf of natural religion. He was convinced that the "Deity is sufficiently revealed through natural Phenomena."[i-413] Extolling the apprehension of the Deity through man's uniform reason, Shaftesbury urbanely lampooned enthusiasm, that private revelation which threatened to prevail against the _consensus gentium_. By 1725 Franklin had divorced theology from morality and morality from conscience, having punctuated his youth with faunish "errata."[i-414] Although he was as a youth too much at ease in Zion, he did not lose substantial (if then a theoretic) faith in the struggle between the law of the spirit and the law of the members. Nurtured by the Bible, Bunyan, Addison and Steele, Tryon, Socrates, and Xenophon--a blend of Christian and classical traditions--he felt the reasonableness, if not the saintliness, of curbing the resolute sway of his natural self.[i-415] After five years with James, a year in Philadelphia where part of the time he worked with Samuel Keimer,[i-416] a fanatic and bearded Camisard, Franklin, through the duplicity of Governor Keith, found himself in November, 1724, aboard the _London-Hope_, England-bound. It would be unfair to Franklin were we to think him a primitive colonist to whom England was an unreal, incalculable land. We remember that James knew the London of Anne, Addison, Steele, Locke, and Newton. And we have seen that the _New England Courant_ library was one of which no London gentleman and scholar need have been ashamed. As a worker on this newspaper Franklin had set up the names and some indications of the thoughts of such men as Fénelon, Tillotson, Defoe, Swift, Butler, Bayle, Isaac Watts, Blount, Burnet, Whiston, Temple, Trenchard and Gordon, Denham, Garth, Dryden, Milton, Locke, Flamstead, and Newton.[i-417]