Ben Franklin’s Closest Evangelical Friend
IN THE LATE 1730S, the Pennsylvania Gazette began covering the phenomenal field meetings of the young English preacher George Whitefield, who was becoming the most-discussed person in Britain and America. Importantly for Franklin, Whitefield would also become the most widely read author in Anglo-America, and the most controversial personality in the news. Picking up information from London newspapers, Franklin recognized the value of Whitefield’s rising star. He reprinted accounts of the itinerant’s preaching as soon as he could—typically two months after the London papers ran them.
The crowds Whitefield was drawing were mind-boggling. One report from London noted that “in the evening [Whitefield] preached at Kennington Common to about 20,000 people, among whom were nearly forty coaches, besides chaises, and about one hundred on horseback; and though there was so great a multitude, an awful silence was kept during the whole time of singing, prayers and sermon.” Further accounts—which Franklin found dubious—had the evangelist preaching before as many as eighty thousand.1
All these people, in an age with no electric amplification? Franklin suspected the man must be a charlatan. When Whitefield came to Philadelphia, Franklin figured he would investigate. To his surprise, Franklin came away impressed. Yes, Whitefield preached the gospel of salvation through Christ, which held little interest for Franklin. But Whitefield thought creatively about doing good. The great benevolent project of Whitefield’s career was an orphanage outside of Savannah, Georgia. Franklin, always fascinated with applied Christianity, was intrigued. He also saw in Whitefield the biggest printing opportunity he had encountered since Poor Richard.
Something about Whitefield’s preaching helped Franklin stay tethered to the faith of his youth, even if he resisted embracing all of Whitefield’s doctrines. As Franklin recalled in his autobiography, Whitefield’s incredible oratory had “a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance.” He went to one of Whitefield’s Philadelphia sermons, curious to see the minister in action but knowing that he would ask for donations for the orphanage. “I silently resolved he should get nothing from me,” Franklin wrote. Few could withstand Whitefield’s appeals, though. “I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold,” Franklin said. “As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”2
Franklin called his relationship with the great preacher a “mere civil friendship.” But it represented more than that, in spite of their enduring differences over faith. It began as a business connection, with Whitefield employing Franklin for his expertise in the new media of the time. Franklin would make a great deal of money from publishing tracts by, about, and against Whitefield. During the height of the Great Awakening, in the early 1740s, more than half of the books that Franklin published were related to Whitefield. Franklin’s newspaper would also increase its coverage of religion by 14 percent between 1735 and 1740. Franklin hitched his wagon to Whitefield’s star, since Whitefield was far more famous. Franklin would become a celebrity too, and the printer and evangelist empathized with one another amid their common experience of fame. Together they were instrumental in founding the University of Pennsylvania, although Whitefield worried that Franklin’s plan for the college was not Christian enough. Whitefield also kept quietly pressing Franklin to accept Jesus as his Savior. Still, Franklin kept Whitefield and Jesus at bay. “He used indeed sometimes to pray for my conversion,” Franklin recalled, “but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard.”3
Like all newspaper publishers, Franklin needed to generate material to put into the Pennsylvania Gazette. Any controversial topic would do, and religion normally worked well. He produced several key religious essays in the years following his marriage to Deborah Read. How much we know about the background to these essays varies. Sometimes the precipitating circumstances are obvious (a recent church fracas or something Franklin read). Sometimes we know so little that we are not even sure that he wrote the piece in question. The latter is the case for the satirical “Meditation on a Quart Mugg,” which he published in the Gazette in July 1733. Franklin scholar J. A. Leo Lemay, unlike the editors of Franklin’s papers, designated the piece as one of Franklin’s.4
Franklin’s “Meditation” was based on Jonathan Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick.” Both mocked the contemplative writing of Robert Boyle, an early physico-theologian in whose hands virtually any occurrence could occasion lyrical musings. Among Boyle’s eclectic topics were a milkmaid singing to her cow and Boyle’s dog fetching his glove. Swift thought such poetic flights were silly. So did Franklin, even though he had recommended prayerful reflection on other physico-theologians’ writings. Franklin was so action-oriented that he worried that the popular literature of “sensibility” could amount to all feeling and no benevolence. Franklin and many traditional Christians worried that the priority of feeling sympathy for the sufferings of others could transform into faux moralism.5
The “Meditation on a Quart Mugg” lamented the “wretched, miserable, and unhappy” fate of the humble mug, the sort used at taverns. “Because of thee are tears made frequently to burst from my eyes,” the author declared lugubriously. In his hands, the mug turned into a Christ-like figure who did not protest his maltreatment by sinners: “How often is he forced into the company of boisterous sots, who lay all their nonsense, noise, profane swearing, cursing, and quarreling, on the harmless mug, which speaks not a word!” There was no way for this “unpitied slave” to seek redress for his grievances, leaving it as the constant victim of “arbitrary power.” Mock it as he might, this kind of moral sentimentalism—and emotional appeals on behalf of victims—became foundational to reform movements such as the campaign against the slave trade and to the Patriot appeals for liberty in the Revolution.6
Morose musings on the futility of life also came into Franklin’s crosshairs in his anonymous “Parody and Reply to a Religious Meditation.” In this instance, Franklin reprinted a poem from English pastor Joshua Smith in order to parody it. Newspapers in London and Boston had already printed the poem before the Gazette did, so it was receiving transatlantic attention, making it an even more appealing target for Franklin’s humor. Smith had reflected, Job-like, “UNHAPPY we, children of the dust! why were we born to see the sun? / Why did our mothers bring us forth to misery; and unkindly rejoice to hear us cry?” The pleasures and vain pursuits of this life, Smith concluded, were bound to terminate with our deaths. Only our good works and God’s favor would go to the grave with us.7
With typical indirection, Franklin responded to Smith’s “melancholy” meditation by writing letters to the editor. As with the “Letter of the Drum,” he was writing letters to himself and publishing them. This mode makes it difficult to follow Franklin’s point, but it enabled him to mock Smith, and those who liked Smith’s kind of poetry, without directly offending subscribers. Smith’s poem would appeal to the “gloomy and splenetick part of your readers,” the letter said, but “as for me, I do not love to see the dark side of things.” Here Franklin showed more ambivalence about the Calvinist view of the world. He asserted that the “world is a very good world,” not the vale of tears that Smith made it out to be. Franklin denied Job’s view that man’s days are “few and full of trouble.” You cannot logically complain about your days being both few and troubled, he wrote. If your “days are full of trouble, the fewer of ’em the better.” (Three decades later, his view of the world’s goodness had sobered a bit. Consoling Jane Mecom on the death of a child, Ben wrote that her departed daughter was “doubtless happy: which none of us are while in this life.”)8
Franklin contended that Joshua Smith was like a child “who laments that he cannot eat his cake and have his cake.” (This proverb was not made up by Franklin; it dates to the sixteenth century in English.) Franklin ran with the cake analogy, interspersing the pastor’s lines of poetry with new ones of his own. Where Smith had written “All the few days we live are full of vanity; and our choicest pleasures sprinkled with bitterness,” Franklin countered that “All the few cakes we have are puffed up with yeast; and the nicest gingerbread is spotted with flyshits!” Smith was being whiny, Franklin suggested, so “away with all such insignificant meditations.” He recommended Solomon’s advice from Ecclesiastes 9:7: “Eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart.” God had not made us oysters, hogs, or horses—we have the power of reason and choice. God had also not made us angels. Somehow the troubles we encountered fit into God’s providential plans. Enjoy what God gives us, instead of lamenting what he has not, Franklin advised.9
After the parody, Franklin composed a reply to Smith concerning the pleasures of life. Those pleasures were this-worldly. By using our God-given reason and pursuing virtue, we could “spend our days in gaining and enjoying the blessings of life, which are innumerable.” Difficulties were but as “sour sauce to the sweet meats we enjoy” and made our blessings that much more satisfying. Hope for eternity was the natural end of a virtuous life. “If we have done all the good we could, we have done all that we ought, and death is no terror to a good man.” As usual, hope for our future state depended on our righteous living on earth. Righteous living was also the most pleasant and satisfying way to live. Borrowing a phrase from Shakespeare, Franklin envisioned the end of life as the “sweet sleep of death,” which would be like settling into bed after a long journey. Franklin did not explain whether this eternal “sleep” would be conscious, but it would certainly be restful for those whose bodies had worn out in doing good.10
Franklin had doubts about the eternal fate of souls. Eminent philosophers such as John Locke argued that because of God’s righteousness, God must address the world’s ills in an afterlife. Franklin himself mused on the subject in the grimly serious 1734 Pennsylvania Gazette essay “The Death of Infants.” Few marriages in early America were spared from the pain of losing children in infancy. Jane Mecom had seen her first child, Josiah, die in 1730, and eleven of her twelve children died before she did. Ben and Deborah would soon lose Franky, who was sickly even as Franklin wrote his reflection on infant mortality. He cited seventeenth-century English economist William Petty’s Political Arithmetick to the effect that half of all children die before they are sixteen.11
In light of these horrible realities, Franklin asserted that the afterlife was essential. Why would God create these children only to have them endure brief lives of suffering, then go to a permanent grave? He followed others such as Locke in admitting that the unresolved crimes and unrelenting suffering in this world made his heart long for a future reckoning. There the “just and the unjust will be equally punished or rewarded by an impartial judge.” Dying babies made a compelling case for the afterlife, too. Human bodies, even in infancy, were a marvel of intricate construction. Why would God give so much care in “framing an exquisite piece of clock-work” only to “dash it to pieces” at birth? If there was no future existence for these dead children, then “every wise man [would] naturally infer, that [God’s] intense application had disturbed his brain and impaired his reason.” The possibility that the grave was the end for dead infants was unnerving. Maybe God really had lost his mind?12
Still, Franklin made a common theistic case for belief in the afterlife, whatever nihilistic undertones the essay contained. The recent death of a child he had known prompted him to write the piece. His sympathy for the fate of the young one drove his conclusion about children’s souls. Franklin employed humanitarian feeling as part of his reasoning. The beauty of that dead child was “now turning apace into corruption.” He could not accept the idea that the child would simply be annihilated. “Reason should despise” the prospect of the destruction of body and soul as “shocking and absurd.” Instead, we should believe that when they departed this life, children became “inhabitants of some more glorious region.” But Franklin speculated, on an unorthodox theme, that the dead might populate worlds elsewhere in the galaxy. They might become “our better Genii, our Guardian Angels [and] watch round our bed and our couch.” He admitted that this was just a theory, for those matters belonged to the “provinces of light and immortality, and lie far beyond our mortal ken.”13
As the essays from the 1730s suggest, Franklin was becoming an important authority on religion in Philadelphia. His prominence as a printer permitted him to weigh in on church politics, too, so he became a key figure in a controversy over the orthodoxy of Philadelphia Presbyterian minister Samuel Hemphill. The city was the center of early American Presbyterianism, whose churches served new immigrants from Ulster, or Northern Ireland. More than 100,000 Scots-Irish immigrants came to the colonies in the first eight decades of the eighteenth century. (The Scots-Irish were the century’s largest cohort of European immigrants.) Many of these immigrants settled in, or at least passed through, Philadelphia. Jedidiah Andrews, the minister whose preaching so displeased Franklin, had become Philadelphia’s key Presbyterian pastor and organizer by the early 1700s. In 1717, Andrews helped to form the Synod of Philadelphia, which oversaw Philadelphia-area presbyteries. These in turn helped to govern the local churches. Andrews was an enormously busy pastor (and an “old man,” wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Franklin).14
In the early 1730s, Andrews received an assistant minister, Samuel Hemphill, who presented credentials from a presbytery in Northern Ireland. Hemphill said that he adhered to the doctrines outlined in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the 1646 classic articulation of Reformed beliefs and a common creedal requirement among Presbyterians. When Hemphill began preaching, Andrews became convinced that the minister was a proponent of deistic moralism. Writing to Boston pastor Benjamin Colman, Andrews lamented that “free-thinkers, deists, [and] nothings, getting a scent of him, flocked to” Hemphill.15
Franklin was among those whom Andrews classed as “free-thinkers, deists, and nothings.” He loved the preaching of Hemphill, who delivered his practical, extemporaneous sermons “with a good voice.” Although George Whitefield’s Calvinist doctrine differed from Hemphill’s, an excellent pulpit performance could always hold Franklin’s attention. The printer became one of Hemphill’s “constant hearers, his sermons pleasing me, as they had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue, or what in the religious style are called Good Works.” This was just the kind of preacher Franklin had been waiting for. So when Andrews and the Philadelphia Synod brought Hemphill up on charges of heterodoxy in 1735, Franklin rushed to his defense.16
Franklin’s advocacy for Hemphill produced his greatest outpouring of religious writings in any one year. Franklin’s “Dialogue between Two Presbyterians” appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette a week before Hemphill’s trial. In it, a critic and a defender of “Mr. H” squared off. The critic complained that the “new-fangled preacher” taught only moral duties, a topic that was not “fit to be preached in a Christian congregation.” Hemphill’s defender wondered how the critic could object to morality since it was so central to the teaching of Christ and the apostles. Citing Matthew 7, the defender noted that Jesus had taught that only those who did “the will of my Father” would enter heaven. Advancing a position that would have horrified his Calvinist family, Franklin (in the voice of the defender) contended that the Bible recommended faith as “a means of producing morality, and morality of salvation.” Virtuous heretics had a better claim on salvation than wicked Christians, he asserted. The idea of faith alone leading to salvation was “neither a Christian doctrine nor a reasonable one.” Surely the synod did not intend to “persecute, silence and condemn a good preacher, for exhorting [people] to be honest and charitable to one another”? The critic retorted that Presbyterians had the right to remove pastors who did not support the Westminster Confession. Franklin countered that, for all the good they did, even the revered Reformers did not recognize all the corruption in Christian teachings. The Westminster divines were not infallible. For Franklin, right living took precedence over right belief. “Peace, unity, and virtue in any church are to be more regarded than orthodoxy,” he admonished.17
Franklin did not help Hemphill by denying the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. Indeed, one of the main charges brought against Hemphill was that his teachings were “subversive of the Scripture doctrine of justification by faith.” Andrews and others unfriendly to Hemphill controlled the trial, and it concluded with his suspension for teachings that were “unsound and dangerous, contrary to the sacred Scriptures and our excellent confession.” The synod delayed a final determination on Hemphill’s standing for several months, which opened the door for Franklin to attack the methods used against Hemphill. First he produced Observations on the Proceedings against Mr. Hemphill, which sold out in two weeks, necessitating a second edition. In it, Franklin sought to clear Hemphill of “false aspersions” and to expose the synod’s unjust approach.18
Scholars attribute Observations to Franklin although the printer chose to maintain anonymity in most of his contributions to this debate. Not revealing his identity allowed him to vent his rage with impunity while protecting his social status in Philadelphia. The Observations and subsequent publications illustrated his ability to engage in high-level doctrinal disputes. In Observations, he tackled the complicated relationship between faith and works in Protestant theology. He commented on a series of extracts from Hemphill’s sermons that had become part of the trial evidence. In one passage, Hemphill challenged the way that certain ministers used Christ’s name like a “charm” in order to “work up the hearers to a warm pitch of enthusiasm.” Franklin glossed this section by noting that Hemphill was teaching against antinomianism. The term “antinomian” harkened back to New England controversies a century earlier, when Anne Hutchinson and her devotees ran afoul of Puritan authorities. They accused Boston ministers of teaching morality at the expense of grace. (Anti-revivalist critics in the Great Awakening would charge Whitefield with antinomianism because he ostensibly emphasized emotional outbursts and dramatic experiences over obedience.) Antinomianism was the “most impious doctrine that ever was broached,” Franklin wrote. It suggested that “Christ came into the world to patronize vice, and allow men to live as they please.” This was a strong point for Franklin. No one in Presbyterian circles would have a good word to say about such a doctrine, and all would agree that free grace did not sanction licentious living. One wonders if Hemphill might have coached Franklin on what to write in the theological sections of his tracts. Whatever the case, the production was another example of Franklin’s remarkable capacity for becoming conversant in fields of knowledge from soteriology to the science of electricity.19
Franklin followed up the Observations with a furious anticlerical piece, A Letter to a Friend in the Country. Franklin certainly wrote the preface to this letter, though he and Hemphill may have collaborated on the body of it. A Letter posited an enduring clash between the power of priests and the freedom of the people. It called on the people to assert their “natural rights and liberties in opposition to [the ministers’] unrighteous claims.” The problem was not that Christian beliefs were false, but that power-hungry ministers had hijacked the faith. Whenever “men blindly submitted themselves to the impositions of priests, whether Popish, Presbyterian or Episcopal, &c. ignorance and error, bigotry, enthusiasm and superstition, more or less, and in proportion to such submission, most certainly ensued.” The Hemphill case represented a new instance of that old priestly threat. Unchecked clerical power fed enthusiasm and superstition, two of Franklin’s great religious foes.20
Hemphill and Franklin also railed against creeds as tests of orthodoxy. Although the Quaker-founded government of Pennsylvania honored liberty of conscience, many Presbyterians wished to require adherence to the Westminster Confession for their pastors. Creedalism had not snuffed out differences of opinion, though; it just made those differences more fractious. A Letter pointed to the diversity of Pennsylvania as a model for religious liberty: “Even in this city we have half a dozen, for aught I know half a score, different sects; and were the hearts of men to be at once opened to our view, we should perhaps see a thousand diversities more.” Why should church authorities squelch those differences? Why not let love be the rule for Christians, and permit honest disagreements “as we do in astronomy or any other part of natural philosophy?” Franklin and Hemphill asked.21
Drawing on pervasive anti-Catholic sentiments, Franklin and Hemphill reminded Pennsylvanians that Catholics were arch-imposers: “The greatest absurdities and falsehoods are supported by this goodly method of imposing creeds and confessions: Such as cringings, bowings, mortifications, penances, transubstantiations, praying to saints and angels, [and] indulgences. . . . If the church has a power of imposing at all, she has a power of imposing everything she looks upon to be truth.” Generous Protestants should not need to force uniformity of doctrine.22
The Hemphill case took an unexpected turn in the summer of 1735, when it became apparent that Hemphill had borrowed unattributed passages from other authors to produce some of his sermons. The clerical commission charged him with plagiarizing from writers including the London Anglican minister Samuel Clarke. Admirers of Clarke considered him “the foremost metaphysician in England.” Critics, by contrast, viewed Clarke as a proponent of Arianism, or the idea that Jesus was separate from and subordinate to God the Father. Although standards against plagiarism were looser in Franklin’s era than today, Franklin still regarded the discovery as unfortunate. It “gave many of our party disgust, who accordingly abandoned his cause, and occasioned our more speedy discomfiture in the synod.” But Franklin was not dismayed. Instead, he “rather approved [Hemphill] giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture.”23
Franklin extended this point in his final pro-Hemphill publication, A Defense of the Rev. Mr. Hemphill’s Observations. Here Franklin took exception to A Vindication of the Reverend Commission of the Synod, believed to have been penned by evangelical pastor Jonathan Dickinson. Franklin mocked the hypocrisy of the learned pastors: “Are they beholden to no author, ancient or modern, for what they know, or what they preach? . . . If they preach from their own natural fund or by immediate inspiration, what need have they either of learning or books? Yet books they have, and must have, and by the help of them are their sermons composed.” They were not so different from Hemphill, except that he had better taste. The traditionalists, Franklin charged, foisted the dullest conclusions of the dullest authors on their unfortunate audiences. It was as if the orthodox clergy “searched only for stupidity and nonsense” in their reading. At least Hemphill “gave us the best parts of the best writers of the age.” Echoing (without citation) another analogy by Jonathan Swift, Franklin asserted that the differences between the imaginative Hemphill and backward pastors such as Andrews were like those between a bee and a fly. A bee “wanders from flower to flower, and for the use of others collects from the whole the most delightful honey; while the other (of a quite different taste) places her happiness entirely in filth, corruption, and ordure.”24
Ratcheting up his onslaught, Franklin contended that instead of defending the gospel, the traditionalists were advocating doctrines that promoted “enthusiasm, demonism, and immorality.” What was the “main design and ultimate end of the Christian revelation?” he asked. It was to “promote the practice of piety, goodness, virtue, and universal righteousness among mankind, or the practice of the moral duties both with respect to God and man, and by these means to make us happy here and hereafter. All the precepts, promises, threatenings, positive institutions, faith in Jesus Christ, and all the peculiarities and discoveries in this revelation tend to this end.” Adding another dash of skepticism, Franklin concluded that “if God gives a revelation to mankind at all, it is this, and this only that can make it worthy of him.”25
Moreover, “natural religion” complemented scripture by fostering the love of God and of neighbor. Hemphill had emphasized the congruence of natural and revealed religion, while the traditionalists emphasized the sharp disjunction between the two. Instead of focusing on the practice of righteousness, for example, they trumpeted the “imputed righteousness” of Christ for believers. This concept, in which God viewed the forgiven sinner through the perfect holiness of Jesus, was a staple of conservative Presbyterian and Puritan theology. Franklin raged against imputed righteousness as “abominably ridiculous and absurd,” a notion subversive to natural religion and Christianity. The doctrine suggested that our moral behavior had nothing to do with faith. He further rejected the idea that because of original sin, the guilt of Adam has been imputed to all of his descendants. Each person should stand accountable for his or her own virtues and vices. The commission, for its part, responded to Franklin’s “ignorant, impertinent harangue” by noting that saving faith “is necessarily accompanied with good works.” God’s regenerating power and the gift of faith were needed to produce true righteousness in any sinner, the traditionalists contended.26
Franklin’s pamphlets placed him as the leading skeptical writer in the American colonies, his anonymity notwithstanding. He displayed deep familiarity with the technical details of anti-Calvinist polemics. This was a special interest he had cultivated in years of reading. Citing the English Baptist and skeptic James Foster, a follower of Samuel Clarke, Franklin argued that the “heathen” could share in salvation if they obeyed God as best they knew how, according to the light of nature. In a classic Protestant move (one he commonly employed), Franklin argued that the traditionalists’ position was less biblical than his. How did they know that those with no exposure to Christianity could not be saved? Was Christ’s death on the cross not powerful enough to extend to all people? Denying another Calvinist precept, Franklin insisted that Jesus died not just for the chosen elect but for everyone. Christ’s mission, the Bible tells us, conveyed a “general benefit, a benefit which regards all men, and in fact, tells us that ‘Christ died for all’ [II Corinthians 5:14].” Would God damn people for eternity for not obeying a law, or believing a message that they had never heard? That doctrine was utterly irrational and cast God in a terrible light, Franklin argued. If we find that the “orthodox” give an irrational interpretation of scripture, then we should return to the text and find a rational reading of it. Reason and scripture could not possibly contradict one another.27
Although Franklin’s writings contained much fodder for skepticism, Franklin maintained a rationalist approach to the scriptures. Rationality and the Bible would both lead to truth, Franklin assumed. In this belief, he joined legions of lay and clerical Bible interpreters from the colonial era to the American Civil War. Franklin’s view of what doctrines were rational departed sharply from those of more traditional believers such as his parents and his sister Jane. Still, the reasonableness of faith was the keystone of Anglo-American theology long before and after Franklin’s life.
Franklin painted Calvinism as irrational. If Calvinism was irrational, then it must not be biblical, he insisted. Although he did sometimes raise the question of whether God gave humankind a revelation at all, Franklin tended to assume that God had given the Bible to the world as a preeminent source of truth. In debates over theology, Franklin began with his contemporary sense of rationality and insisted that valid doctrines must match up with that standard. Traditionalists started with orthodox theology, as framed by the Westminster Confession of Faith and similar documents, and assumed that such doctrines were rational. Unlike more radical deists such as his revolutionary ally Tom Paine, Franklin did not devote much time to the question of whether the whole Bible was credible as true revelation.28
For Franklin, the Hemphill debate entailed far more than the pastor’s career. Franklin was battling against the faith of his parents. The evidence of plagiarism had derailed hope of Hemphill saving his job anyway. The synod confirmed Hemphill’s final dismissal in September 1735, and Hemphill left the colony. Franklin had directed his most venomous attacks against Philadelphia pastors who used Calvinism to maintain their power, and to exclude those like Hemphill who doubted the creed. Franklin’s exasperation at the synod finally produced one of his classic aphorisms:
Asses are grave and dull Animals,
Our Authors are grave and dull Animals; therefore
Our Authors are grave, dull, or if you will, Rev. Asses.29
How did the skeptical Franklin, who called the pastors “Rev. Asses,” become close friends with George Whitefield, the greatest evangelist of the age? Part of the explanation is that Franklin never embraced his role as a public anti-Christian skeptic. He wished to portray—indeed, he wished to construct—himself as an advocate of ethics-centered, doctrinally minimal Christianity.30 But events in the mid-1730s kept taking him off track. In the Hemphill case, he cemented a reputation as an antagonist of orthodoxy. Then a bizarre incident with the Freemasons implicated Franklin not just in irreligion but possibly in outright Satanism.
The controversy began when a naive apprentice named Daniel Rees approached his master, Evan Jones, and some of Jones’s friends, whom he incorrectly believed could gain him admission to Philadelphia’s Masonic lodge. Rees thought that joining the secret society was a step toward gentility and independence. Jones and his friends decided to have some fun at Rees’s expense. They led him through a mock Masonic ritual in which they made him swear a diabolical oath and kiss the bare posterior of one of the bullies. The harassment continued another evening when Jones and his friends took Rees into a dark cellar and tried to convince him that they were demons. To do so, they ignited a pan of liquor and illuminated their faces with the flickering blue flames. The trick did not seem to frighten Rees, however. When he insisted that he was not afraid, Jones either spilled or threw the pan’s burning contents on him. His clothes lit on fire and burned Rees. Three days later, he died.31
Trial records showed that when Jones and his friends told Franklin about the first humiliating rite, Franklin found it funny and laughed heartily. He asked for a copy of the Satanic oath and showed it around to friends. When this information came out during the investigation of Rees’s death, however, Andrew Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury accused Franklin of contributing to Rees’s demise. It also reported that Franklin had added to Rees’s humiliation by making Masonic signs to him and congratulating Rees on having joined the brotherhood.32 Philadelphia’s Freemasons took to the pages of Franklin’s Gazette to defend themselves. The miscreants who tricked and killed Rees did not belong to the Philadelphia lodge, they insisted. No true Mason approved of what Jones had done. Given the secrecy of the Masons’ proceedings, they could not afford to be tarred by association with Satanic rituals and murder.33
Franklin appeared as a witness in the trial of Jones and his accomplices. The alarmed Franklin thought that the newspaper attack on him was unfair, and he realized that the “aspersions” could injure his carefully cultivated reputation. A man who approved the bullying of a doomed apprentice was hardly a paragon of virtue. He admitted in court that Jones had told him about tricking Rees into thinking that they were initiating him. When Jones told him about the “ridiculous signs” they taught Rees, Franklin laughed (“perhaps heartily,” he admitted). But as Jones’s story proceeded to the mocking and the diabolical oath, Franklin insisted that he stopped laughing and grew “serious.” He warned them that when Rees learned how they had deceived him, he would never forgive them. Franklin denied the charges that he had played along when Rees made the bogus Masonic signs to him or welcomed him as a new initiate. Meeting the printer at a tavern, Jones had tried to bring Franklin in on the joke, telling Rees that Franklin was a Freemason and that he should “make a sign to him.” Franklin said he was embarrassed and stared out the tavern window instead. Franklin claimed that he tried to advise Rees privately of Jones’s shenanigans—but he missed his chance. In the end, Franklin’s reputation survived the killing of Rees mostly untarnished. The authorities convicted Jones of manslaughter, sentenced him to having his hand branded (a lesser version of Rees’s excruciating ordeal), and released him.34
The coverage of the Rees incident humiliated Franklin, and it came hard on the heels of his efforts to defend Samuel Hemphill. Jones’s trial also precipitated a remarkable exchange between Franklin and his aging parents (Josiah would pass away in 1745, Abiah in 1752), who still worried about their prosperous son’s soul. Josiah and Abiah had read the Boston newspapers’ accounts of the trial and were troubled to learn of Ben’s involvement. They wrote to him, imploring him to avoid the heterodox Freemasons and to come back to the Calvinist faith of his youth. Franklin assured them that the Freemasons were “harmless,” and that they promoted nothing “inconsistent with religion or good manners.”35
As to their concern for his “erroneous opinions,” Franklin pled guilty, after a fashion. He was confident that he was wrong about some of his convictions. Everyone believed in some false ideas, due to the “imperfection of human understanding.” Although the Calvinist tradition was ambivalent about the reliability of human knowledge, Franklin indicted Calvinists for overconfidence. In a typical move, Franklin employed an aspect of Reformed thought (human frailty) to make an anti-Calvinist argument. We are so influenced by our cultural and intellectual surroundings, he warned, that no one should presume that they hold objective truth. At other times Franklin professed great confidence in unfettered reason, but to his parents he emphasized how corrupted reason could become under unreliable influences.36
Echoing themes from the Hemphill controversy, Franklin insisted that no pastor, church, or council—whether Protestant or Catholic—should pretend to infallibility. Neither should laypeople. “Opinions should be judged of by their influences and effects,” he posited. He hoped that his parents would grant that his skepticism did not make him an immoral person. If it were possible to change one’s opinions “to please others,” he would do so for his beloved parents, he wrote. (Implicitly, he charged them with asking that he change his views merely to please them. In another draft of the letter, Franklin wrote that he believed it was wrong to be “angry with any one for differing in judgment from me.”) Striking another Calvinist theme, Franklin contended that a person did not get to choose his or her own convictions. All he could do was weigh the evidence about God and believe what seems right. “If after all I continue in the same errors, I believe your usual charity will induce you rather to pity” than indignation, he told them.37
But parental charity was not forthcoming. “My mother grieves that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian,” he wrote to his parents. Presumably Abiah was thinking of Ben as the Arian, or a non-Trinitarian, with regard to the nature of Jesus. Franklin pressed on with his dismissal of doctrinal boundaries. He claimed to not even know what an Arian or Arminian was. “I make such distinctions very little my study,” he wrote (a claim belied by his informed participation in the Hemphill debates). “At the last day,” he told his parents, “we shall not be examined what we thought, but what we did,” citing the Gospel of Matthew 25.38 His parents might well have asked how Franklin knew that morality was more important than doctrine. How did he even know that Matthew 25 was reliable? If we have little basis for theological certainty, how can anyone know what God thinks about ethics? Or what God is like at all? In any case, he thanked them for their care and concern. But he made it clear that, intellectually and socially, he was now his own man.39
Franklin did not wish to be rude to his parents, but undue attachment to familial tradition was, to him, a common obstacle to truth. Sometimes Franklin used Poor Richard to comment on the tensions regarding the faith of one’s forefathers. In the 1739 edition (prepared the same year as the exchange with his parents), Franklin printed an epigram found in a 1734 edition of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine, the first Anglo-American periodical to describe itself as a magazine. The lines explained how the gullibility of previous generations can lead to unbelief today:
What Legions of Fables and whimsical Tales
Pass current for Gospel where Priestcraft prevails!
Our Ancestors thus were most strangely deceiv’d,
What Stories and Nonsense for Truth they believ’d!
But we their wise Sons, who these Fables reject,
Ev’n Truth now-a-days, are too apt to suspect:
From believing too much, the right Faith we let fall;
So now we believe—’troth nothing at all.
Franklin added a proverb to bolster the point: “Let our fathers and grandfathers be valued for their goodness, ourselves for our own.” We might honor them for their virtue, but we are not beholden to our parents and grandparents. Franklin then continued, “sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden but it is forbidden because it’s hurtful. Nor is a duty beneficial because it is commanded, but it is commanded, because it’s beneficial.” The point of religion was to foster practical virtue. If one’s religion did not do that, it was not true. It was no good defending one’s beliefs by stubborn recourse to revelation, or by insisting “thus saith the Lord.”40
Because of the Hemphill controversy and the Daniel Rees tragedy, Franklin endured many attacks about his heterodox views and allegedly immoral behavior. The thirty-three-year-old had sought to craft a public persona of virtue and industry, but these episodes threatened to undo his image. He was at risk of becoming known as a scandalous heretic. This would not do. The year 1739 marked a turning point, as Franklin began muting his skeptical opinions on religion. He started focusing on modeling the kind of ethical devotion he propounded, and sought to set aside his anticlerical, anti-institutional bombast. For example, in addition to his rented pew at Christ Church, Franklin listed himself as a subscriber who promised to help support expanded seating for the growing church.41
The key to Franklin’s transition, however, was his encounter with George Whitefield. Whitefield went to Oxford in the 1730s and had become part of the “Holy Club” associated with John and Charles Wesley, founders of the Methodist movement. The Wesleys’ recommendations of classic devotional books helped the anxious Whitefield break through to spiritual conversion in 1735. Whitefield had long displayed an aptitude for public speaking and stage acting, and he brought those gifts to the service of the evangelical gospel. Because churches could not hold the throngs that gathered to hear him, Whitefield went into the fields, drawing thousands more. The Wesleys recruited him to go as a missionary to Georgia in 1737, just as his fame began to flourish. He returned to England in late 1738, where his celebrity went stratospheric. Almost as soon as he landed back in England, Whitefield was thinking about returning to the colonies, this time for a preaching tour.
The gathering Whitefield storm began to resound in America in 1737, when the Pennsylvania Gazette and the New-York Weekly Journal printed a snippet regarding Whitefield’s charitable investment in the new Georgia colony. “The sum of £80 was paid into the Bank of England, being the benefaction of a person unknown, by the hands of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield; to be applied by the trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America, towards building a church at Frederica.” The next year and early 1739 were quiet, as Whitefield traveled in Georgia. Then the media dam burst in mid-1739. In July, Franklin reprinted a London account of Whitefield preaching on consecutive days in May to audiences of ten and twenty thousand each.42
George Whitefield, engraving by Elisha Gallaudet, New York, 1774 (detail). Courtesy Library of Congress.
Franklin followed Whitefield’s movements as the evangelist departed for his new American tour. The November 8 edition of the Gazette heralded Whitefield’s arrival in Lewes Town, Delaware. Whitefield and his lead publicist, William Seward, immediately recognized Franklin as an important American media connection. In the same 1739 issue of the Gazette in which Franklin reported on Whitefield’s arrival, Whitefield and Seward placed an advertisement of items for sale to finance the itinerant’s journey and the construction of the Savannah orphanage. Aside from hardware goods, he was selling fabric from London: “Spun yarn, ruggs and blankets, duffills strip’d, brills for bed sacking . . . Scotch cloth, cotton romalls, seirsuckers, white dimities . . . buttons, buckrams, and sewing silk.” From the start, Whitefield’s ministry thrived on marketing. The business connections between Whitefield and Franklin ran in multiple directions, printing and selling Whitefield imprints, advertising Whitefield’s goods for sale, covering Whitefield’s events, and more.43
Franklin’s competitor Andrew Bradford began printing Whitefield’s sermons first, as the American Weekly Mercury advertised the publication of Whitefield’s The Marks of the New Birth in November 1739. Whitefield and Seward seem to have approached Bradford and Franklin separately, within weeks of their arrival, giving them both materials to publish. Bradford got sermons. But Franklin also got copies of Whitefield’s travel journals, probably Whitefield’s most successful publications of all. Whitefield wrote that “one of the printers” in Philadelphia, undoubtedly Franklin, had told him that he had already taken more than two hundred subscriptions for the sermons and journals. In November 1739, Franklin announced the subscription program in the Gazette. The “Rev. Mr. Whitefield having given me copies of his journals and sermons, with leave to print the same; I propose to publish them with all expedition, if I find sufficient encouragement,” Franklin wrote. “Those therefore who are inclined to encourage this work, are desired speedily to send in their names to me.”44
Printers loved subscription programs because they guaranteed against overproduction of books. Taking subscriptions, and printing based on demand, was less risky than printing books first and then trying to sell them. But few authors generated the kind of demand that made subscription schemes worthwhile. A reader might have to wait months to get the book in question. Whitefield was unique, the perfect author for a subscription plan. Thousands of readers would prepay Franklin and his affiliated printers across the colonies in order to get early access to Whitefield materials. Indeed, Franklin struggled to keep up with the number of subscribers. By mid-1740, he announced that subscribers who had already paid, or who brought cash to his office, would get their copies first. People who bought on credit would have to wait.45
Whitefield was a publisher’s dream come true. He and Seward helped sell subscriptions as much as any author’s team could in the eighteenth century. Franklin’s efforts complemented what Whitefield was already doing. Whitefield expertly promoted his ministry, and delivered products that catered to the tastes of a broad reading public. One of the biggest differences between Whitefield and other religious authors was that Whitefield wrote short manuscripts. His journals came out in brief, serial editions.
Franklin already knew that there was a steady appetite for theology among Anglo-American readers. But during the height of the Great Awakening, whatever Whitefield touched turned to gold, and a lot of that gold went into Franklin’s pockets. Although most in Whitefield’s audiences had basic familiarity with theology and the Bible, he avoided technical theological points in his revival preaching. As he said in one sermon, he came “not to shoot over your heads, but rather . . . to reach your hearts.” In certain publications, Whitefield battled over high-level doctrinal concerns such as the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism. But even these polemical imprints sold well.46
Franklin realized that a decent percentage of the hundreds of thousands who attended Whitefield’s meetings would buy his books. That guaranteed good results for Whitefield materials. No one had the kind of potential audience that Whitefield did, and Franklin did whatever he could to keep the momentum going. During the fourteen months of Whitefield’s great campaign in the colonies, Franklin ran Whitefield-related content in forty-five of the sixty issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Many of these items were reports on Whitefield’s meetings supplied by William Seward, accounts that Franklin and many other printers ran unattributed.47
Although their doctrinal differences were stark, Franklin found more to like in Whitefield’s ministry than just money. Aside from his charitable work, Whitefield showed shocking disdain for clerical authority and for the denominational boundaries that divided Protestants. When the Anglican commissary of Boston chastised the itinerant for cooperating with non-Anglicans, Whitefield replied that he “saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church folks [Anglicans], all children of God, and yet all born again in a different way of worship, and who can tell which is most evangelical?” Franklin loved it. Nonetheless, the printer had to overcome doubts about the veracity of reported crowd sizes before he could promote Whitefield’s work. The stories of crowds of up to eighty thousand people in London seemed outrageous (and indeed, William Seward did include some implausibly high crowd totals in his accounts).48
In classic Franklin manner, he decided to set up an experiment to test these numbers. When he went to hear the revivalist, two qualities struck Franklin about Whitefield and his assemblies. One was that Whitefield’s “loud and clear voice” traversed great distances. The second was “the most exact silence” that the crowd maintained so that they could hear Whitefield. The revivalist “preached one evening from the top of the [Philadelphia] Court House steps,” and the town’s streets were “filled with his hearers to a considerable distance.” This was Franklin’s chance: “I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the river, and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front-Street, when some noise in that street, obscured it. Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty-thousand.”49
A recent study by acoustic scientists suggests that there were some problems in Franklin’s calculations. He misunderstood the way that sound travels over space, and he probably gave people too little room in the crowd. Nevertheless, his experiment produced a decent estimate of Whitefield’s effective acoustic range. The calculation convinced Franklin that the reports were real. It “reconciled me,” he wrote, “to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to 25,000 people in the fields.” Franklin was dazzled, as were most people who encountered Whitefield’s preaching for the first time.50
Thus began one of the most profitable ventures of Franklin’s publishing career, and a thirty-year friendship with the most recognized evangelical leader in the Anglo-American world. It was a step away from the fractious, skeptical mode that had threatened Franklin’s reputation in the Hemphill affair. In spite of Whitefield’s persistent pleading over the years, no evangelical conversion was on the horizon for Franklin. But since the day he counted up the crowd, Franklin defended Whitefield as “a perfectly honest man.” Franklin wanted people to understand that his admiration for Whitefield endured in spite of their religious differences. “My testimony in his favor ought to have the more weight, as we had no religious connection,” he assured readers of his Autobiography.51