Benjamin Franklin was almost the exact contemporary of Jonathan Edwards, but he had the inestimable advantage of living longer and seeing more; two continents and two ages, in fact, were his familiars, and learned from him as well as taught him. Franklin, it is clear, was strongly influenced by that French eighteenth century which he loved, with its praise of reason and its trust in common sense. But he was even more a product of the new America. America, as Edwards and Cotton Mather saw it, was an experiment in godliness. When the Puritan scheme should have proved its efficacy by an abnormal increase in the number of earthly saints, the colonies would have served their chief end, and would, so Mather thought, decline. The hell-breathing vehemence of Edwards was chiefly due to his fear that the scheme was failing. He was fighting a spiritual decline. But Franklin was a member of the worldly, not the spiritual, body of America; he was a citizen of a country visibly growing in wealth and population. He looked outward, not inward; forward, not backward. Like Edwards, he hated sin; but sin for him was not sin because it was forbidden, but forbidden because it was sin. Franklin’s was a practical morality, which was cut to fit life, not to compress it. His firm character and the clarity of his reason kept his morals high. His ethics were admirable, but they were based upon the principle that honesty is the best policy, not upon the fear of God. To be “reasonable” was his highest good. “So convenient it is to be a reasonable creature,” he remarks whimsically, “since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” As long as one is a Franklin, with the will to virtue, honesty, industry, and thrift that is bred from a good inheritance, in a new and developing country, such ethics make for idealism. No one was more idealistic in his day than the practical Franklin, who wished to form a league of virtue of all nations to be governed by rules, and supported by the reason of virtuous mankind. And here is another palpable strain of Americanism, differing from that necessity which Edwards trumpeted, but, like it, a stiffener of idealistic impulses. Here one places the love of a square deal, the desire to do what is right because it is “fair,” the sense of the reasonableness of justice that freed the slaves, gave Cuba self-government, determined our policy toward the Philippines, and was horror-struck by the invasion of Belgium. It is the idealism of good common sense, and together with the mental habit of willing the right has been a main cause of American idealism.