I’m reading my way through the Harvard Classics series, a great books collection. Volume 1 features writings by Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, and William Penn. Franklin starts the entire series–as if he planned it that way himself.
By all accounts, especially his own, Benjamin Franklin was a great man, as may be accounted in the eyes of the world. He was successful in business, politics, science, public life, diplomacy, journalism, and invention, and for all these things he is duly recognized. His being more remarkable in all these areas than nearly all his contemporaries ensures him a place in the history of this country.
Franklin was a voracious reader as a youth and young man, and this gave him a facility in words and reason that equipped him for the many areas of service he engaged throughout his life. He was not a believer but claimed a dependence on divine providence as long as that seemed to go along with his agenda or endeavors. He was not a pious man but respected those who were, such as George Whitefield.
Franklin almost never mentions his friends and associates except in ways that bear on one or another of his projects. He only mentions his son, Will, in passing with reference to same, and his wife he mentions almost not at all. Franklin was granted a large measure of the common grace of God, but he seldom if ever returned thanks to the Almighty for His kindness, except for this remark early on: “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.” This comment appeared early in the first part of his Autobiography, which was completed when he was 51. The sentiment does not appear in the latter part of his work, written in the last year of his life.
Franklin lived an industrious life. He was always busy on one or another project–reading, writing, publishing, public works, and the like. He justified his mention of all his projects: “I mention this industry the more particularly and the more freely, tho’ it seems to be talking in my own praise, that those of my posterity, who shall read it, may know the use of that virtue, when they see its effects in my favour throughout this relation.” Much of it does, indeed, seem to be talking to his own praise.
Franklin goes to great lengths to expound his view of virtue and the course he employed to ensure that he would be a virtuous man, which, he assures us, he typically was. If he was not, he has chosen not to advise us. He offered many fine insights in his writing, these again the fruit of his reading and the common grace of God. An example: “Human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.”
One cannot deny Franklin his place in the annals of humankind, a place he was careful to assure for himself by giving this report of his success and reputation. I find I do not much like Benjamin Franklin, perhaps because I see in him a reflection of what has often been in my own soul an inclination to vanity and self-promotion.
Eliot, Charles W.; Redhouse; Franklin, Benjamin; Woolman, John; Penn, William; Plato; Epictetus; Aurelius, Marcus; Bacon, Francis; Milton, John; Browne, Thomas; Burns, Robert. The Complete Harvard Classics 2021 Edition – ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction (Function). Kindle Edition.