And you, too, if ever you are tried—as every man must be in one way or another—must learn to do the like with every burthen on your soul, if you would not have it hanging round you heavily, and ever more heavily, and dragging you down lower and lower till your dying day. CXXV. The English prejudice against Franklin on religious grounds is quite unreasonable. He was suspected of being a Freethinker, and was professedly a philosopher and man of science; he was a friend of Tom Paine and other dreadful persons; he had actually published “An Abridgment of the Church Prayer-Book,” dedicated “to the serious and discerning,” by the use of which he had the audacity to suppose that religion would be furthered, unanimity increased, and a more frequent attendance on the worship of God secured. Any one of these charges was sufficient to ruin a man’s religious reputation in respectable England of the last generation, but it is high time that amends were made in these days. Let us glance at the real facts. As a boy, Franklin had the disease which all thoughtful boys have to pass through, and puzzled himself with speculations as to the attributes of God and the existence of evil, which landed him in the conclusion that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions. These views he published at the mature age of nineteen, but became disgusted with them almost immediately, and abandoned metaphysics for other more satisfactory studies. Living in the eighteenth century, when happiness was held to be “our being’s end and aim,” he seems to have now conformed to that popular belief; but as he came also to the conclusion that “the felicity of life” was to be attained through “truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man,” and acted up to this conclusion, no great objection from a moral or religious standpoint can be taken to this stage of his development. At the age of twenty-two he composed a little liturgy for his own use, which he fell back on when the sermons of the minister of the only Presbyterian church in Philadelphia had driven him from attendance at chapel. He did not, however, long remain unattached, and after his marriage joined the Church of England, in which he remained till the end of his life. What his sentiments were in middle life may be gathered from his advice to his daughter on the eve of his third departure for England: “Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of devotion in the Common Prayer-Book is your principle business there, and if properly attended to will do more toward amending the heart than sermons.... I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better than the man, as sweet and clear waters come through very dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head as you seem to express some inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you do.”