Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2). Bruce Wiliam Cabell

of age, Franklin in one of his letters addresses him as "My Dear Child" and signs himself, "Your loving Grandfather." While the two remained in France, the old man improved every opportunity to advance the fortunes of the younger one, matrimonial or otherwise. When his legs grew too gouty to enable him to keep pace in mounting the stairways at Versailles with the other foreign ministers, it was by Temple that he was represented at Court levées. By him Temple was also introduced to Voltaire, and enjoyed the unusual honor of having that great man with an expressive gesture say to him: "My child, God and Liberty! Recollect those two words." To Temple, too, was delegated by our envoys the office of handing to Vergennes the memorial proposing an alliance between France, Spain and the United States, and it was he who actually delivered to Lafayette, on behalf of his grandfather, the handsome sword with which Congress had honored the former. When the olive branch extended by William Franklin to Franklin was accepted by him, Temple was sent over by him to William in England for a season as the best peace-offering in the gift of the sender. "I send your Son over to pay his Duty to you," he wrote to William. "You will find him much improv'd. He is greatly esteem'd and belov'd in this Country, and will make his Way anywhere." A letter written to Temple, during his absence on this occasion, by his grandfather, in which his grandfather pathetically complains of his silence, is another minor proof of the devotion felt by Franklin for Temple. And there is every reason to believe that the feeling was fully returned; for even the prospect of being united to the daughter of Madame Brillon, with the full sanction of his grandfather, was not sufficient to reconcile Temple to the thought of being left behind in France by him. So far from being heeded by Congress was the request of Franklin that some public office be conferred upon Temple that the latter was even displaced in his secretaryship by another person without a line of notice from Congress to his grandfather. And when the two arrived in America, after they had lingered long enough at Southampton for William Franklin to transfer to his son a farm of some six hundred acres at Rancocas, in the State of New Jersey, purchased for Temple by Franklin, Temple fared no better at the hands of the American Government than in France. His efforts, first, to secure the Secretaryship of the Federal Convention of 1787, and, afterwards, to obtain some appointment under the administration of Washington, met with no success, despite all that his grandfather could do for him. For a while he lived on his Terre, as Franklin called it, at Rancocas, but, after the death of Franklin, who did not forget him in his will, he became restless, and wandered back to the Old World, where he delayed so long the publication of his grandfather's writings, bequeathed to him by the latter, that he was strongly but unjustly suspected for a time of having been bribed by the British Government to suppress them. His slender literary qualifications for giving the proper perspective to such a mass of material had simply stood appalled at the magnitude of their task.

      CHAPTER II

      Franklin's Religious Beliefs

      Closely akin to Franklin's system of morals were his views about Religion. Scattered through his writings are sentences full of gratitude to God for His favor in lifting him up from such a low to such a high estate, in bringing him substantially unscathed through the graver dangers and baser temptations of human life, and in affording him the assurance that the divine goodness, of which he had received such signal proofs in his career, would not cease with his death. In the Autobiography, after alluding in modest terms to the poverty and obscurity, in which he was born and bred, and the affluence and reputation subsequently won by him, he says:

      And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions.

      These words, though they occur in the work which Franklin tells us was written when he was not dressed for a ball, he well knew would be read by other eyes than those of the son for whom they were primarily intended; but one of his familiar letters to his wife, written some years before the Autobiography was begun, contains expressions equally devout; associated on this occasion, however, with the aspirations for the welfare of his fellow creatures which constituted the real religion of his life.

      God is very good to us both in many Respects [he wrote]. Let us enjoy his Favours with a thankful & chearful Heart; and, as we can make no direct Return to him, show our Sense of his Goodness to us, by continuing to do Good to our Fellow Creatures, without Regarding the Returns they make us, whether Good or Bad. For they are all his Children, tho' they may sometimes be our Enemies. The Friendships of this World are changeable, uncertain, transitory Things; but his Favour, if we can secure it, is an Inheritance forever.

      With respect to the successful issue, to which a manifest Providence had, after so many vicissitudes and perils, conducted the American Revolution, he wrote to Josiah Quincy in words as solemn as a Te Deum:

      Considering all our Mistakes and Mismanagements, it is wonderful we have finished our Affair so well, and so soon. Indeed, I am wrong in using that Expression, "We have finished our Affair so well". Our Blunders have been many, and they serve to manifest the Hand of Providence more clearly in our Favour; so that we may much more properly say, These are Thy Doings, O Lord, and they are marvellous in our Eyes.

      Franklin might well have seen the hand of Providence in the momentous result for which he had dared so much and labored so long, and which meant so much to human history, but its shaping power over the destiny of even such a Murad the Unlucky as his hapless nephew, Benny Mecom, is recognized by him in a letter to his beloved sister, Jane Mecom, and her husband when Benny had gone off to seek his fortune as a printer in Antigua. "After all," he concludes, "having taken care to do what appears to be for the best, we must submit to God's providence, which orders all things really for the best." On another occasion, in an ingenious paper on Water Spouts, the sage philosopher, seeing in the benign manner in which the waters of the ocean rid themselves of salt, in the process of evaporation, the same God that the poor Indian sees in the clouds or hears in the wind, impressively exclaims: "He who hath proportioned and given proper Qualities to all Things, was not unmindful of this. Let us adore Him with Praise and Thanksgiving." There are certain human feelings which rise in moments of uncommon stress or fervor from the profoundest depths of our being to our lips and take on the form and rhythm of sonorous religious utterance, if for no better reason, because no other language is lofty or musical enough to serve aptly the purposes of such supreme occasions; and this is true even of an individuality so meagrely spiritual as that of Franklin.

      Other expressions of the same character furnish a religious or quasi-religious setting to Franklin's thoughts upon his own dissolution. To his brave and cheerful spirit, which experienced so little difficulty in accommodating its normal philosophy to all the fixed facts and laws of existence, death was as natural as life – a thing not to be invited before its time but to be accepted with unmurmuring serenity when it came. The only certain things in this world, he said in his home-spun way, are death and taxes.

      It is the will of God and nature [he wrote in his fifty-first year to Elizabeth Hubbard, after the death of his brother John] that these mortal bodies be laid aside, when the soul is to enter into real life. This is rather an embryo state, a preparation for living. A man is not completely born until he be dead. Why then should we grieve, that a new child is born among the immortals, a new member added to their happy society?

      We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God. When they become unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain instead of pleasure, instead of an aid become an incumbrance, and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent, that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way. We ourselves, in some cases, prudently choose a partial death. A mangled painful limb, which cannot be restored, we willingly cut off. He who plucks out a tooth, parts with it freely, since the pain goes with it; and he, who quits the whole body, parts at once with all pains and possibilities of pains and diseases which it