Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own WritingsBruce, Wiliam Cabell
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Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
Bruce, Wiliam Cabell
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
How little Franklin was inclined to undervalue Religion as a support of
good conduct is, among other things, shown by the concern which he
occasionally expressed in his letters, when he was abroad, that his wife
and daughter should not be slack in attending divine worship. One of his
letters to Sally of this nature we have already quoted. Another to his wife
expresses the hope that Sally "continues to love going to Church," and
states that he would have her read over and over again the Whole Duty of
Man and the Lady's Library. In another letter to his wife, he says: "You
spent your Sunday very well, but I think you should go oftner to Church."
Fortified as he was by his _Art of Virtue_, he felt that church attendance
was but a matter of secondary importance for him, but he was eager that his
wife and daughter, who had not acquired the habitude of the virtues as he
had, should not neglect the old immemorial aids to rectitude.
Even to the levity, with which religious topics might be handled, he set
distinct limits. He had no objection to a good-humored joke at the expense
of their superficial aspects even if it was a little broad, but with
malignant or derisive attacks upon religion he had no sympathy whatever. In
the _Autobiography_, he denounces with manifest sincerity, as a wicked
travesty, the doggerel version of the Bible, composed by Dr. Brown, who
kept the inn, eight or ten miles from Burlington, at which he lodged
overnight, on his first journey from Boston to Philadelphia. Nothing that
he ever wrote is wiser or sounder than the letter which he addressed to a
friend, dissuading him from publishing a "piece," impugning the Doctrine of
a Special Providence. In its utilitarian conceptions of religion and
virtue, in the emphasis placed by it upon habit as the best security for
righteous conduct, in the cautious respect that it manifests for the
general sentiments of mankind on religious subjects, we have a concise
revelation of his whole attitude towards Religion, when he was turning his
face seriously towards it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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