The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (29 page)

Andrews may have been persuasive, but he was not eloquent. “His discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect,” Franklin said, “and were all to me very dry, uninteresting and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens.” Franklin served out his time, then left in disappointment and no little disgust.

He stayed away until the arrival of a new preacher. The growth of population in the colony more than offset Andrews’s inadequacy in the pulpit, and the pastor’s workload increased. In 1733 he called across the Atlantic for an assistant, who arrived in the latter part of 1734. For all its amenities, Philadelphia was not the first choice of every promising young minister in the British Isles; as a result, Andrews and the Presbyterian synod had to take whom they could get. Whom they got was Samuel Hemphill, lately of Ireland, oratorically gifted but, according to his critics, doctrinally suspect. A fellow minister who knew him in Ireland called him a “new-light man”—a term denoting an unsettling latitudinarianism, either theological or institutional or both—as well as, more specifically, “a vile heretic, a preacher of morality rather than dogma.”

Franklin cared nothing for the purity of Presbyterian dogma, and if Hemphill preached morality rather than dogma, he was probably worth a
hearing. Franklin returned to Sunday services and enjoyed “most excellent discourses,” which “had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue, or what in the religious style are called good works.” Franklin was not alone in his enthusiasm for the new man; according to Andrews, who was now having second thoughts about Hemphill, “free-thinkers, Deists, nothings, getting a scent of him, flocked to him.”

Hemphill’s popularity with this unholy mob was prima facie evidence of his irregularity. At Andrews’s urging, the Presbyterian synod conducted an investigation, which culminated in a trial. Franklin might have let the matter alone, as being solely the concern of narrow-minded sectarians, but he believed that Hemphill’s emphasis on good works could have only a beneficent influence on civic life, and he was loath to lose it. Besides, the actions of Andrews and the synod struck the same anti-authoritarian nerve in Franklin that had made it impossible for him to remain in Boston. Let the dogmatists speak their piece, he believed, but do not let them stifle the opinions of others.

Franklin joined the fray, though he had no standing in the matter. The week before Hemphill’s trial Franklin published an imagined dialogue between two Presbyterians on the streets of Philadelphia. One defends the position of the Presbyterian synod; the other—clearly speaking for Franklin—dismantles the synod’s arguments. When the first complains that the new minister preaches morality rather than faith, the second says, “What is Christ’s Sermon on the Mount but an excellent moral discourse?” The first replies that, regardless, the Presbyterians have the right to determine who will preach from their pulpit; anyone who will not subscribe to the Westminster Confession should be barred. The second answers that just as Luther had found error in the practices of the Church of Rome, and Calvin been obliged to modify Luther, so might synods today correct Westminster. “Why must we be for ever confined to that, or any, Confession?” The first says that most Presbyterians are perfectly happy with the Westminster Confession; this being so, they have every right to prohibit their pulpit to an innovator. The second responds that a majority can be mistaken. At the beginning of the Reformation, the reformers were in a distinct minority. Besides, Presbyterians deem it their right to preach their version of the Gospel to unbelievers; they ought to accord a similar right to others, even if they think those others misguided. They might learn something. “We have justly denied the infallibility of the Pope and his councils and synods in their interpretations of scripture, and can we modestly claim infallibility for our selves
or our synods?” None can know, this side of heaven, where lies true orthodoxy. In the meantime, “No point of faith is so plain as that morality is our duty, for all sides agree in that. A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”

Franklin must have realized this last statement made him sound almost like a papist; the crux of the Reformation had been Luther’s conviction that faith, not good works, was what allowed a person to be saved. Whether he expected that his little dialogue would help Hemphill before the synod is unclear; in the event, that body voted unanimously to censure the preacher and suspend him from his ministerial office. It did not help Hemphill’s case that he was caught having cribbed his sermons from others. He explained to Franklin that he had an exceedingly retentive memory; he needed to read a text only once and he knew it by heart. Franklin, embarrassed at seeming to defend plagiarism, nonetheless made the best of things. “I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture.”

In fact, by now Hemphill was almost the least of Franklin’s concerns. Franklin could hardly contest the
right
of the synod to dismiss Hemphill, but he
could
challenge their
wisdom
in doing so. He did precisely this, in language that grew more vehement as the controversy continued. In July 1735 Franklin published a pamphlet dissecting the proceedings to date. He rebutted, article by article, the prosecution’s charges and evidence. He alleged “malice and envy” in certain of the accusers, “hot distempered zeal” in others, and he likened the entire affair to the Inquisition. When the synod responded with a defense of its actions, Franklin put out another pamphlet, in which such slight circumspection as his first one exhibited had evaporated entirely. He called the camp of the synod “the dominion of bigotry and prejudice”; their evidence showed “pious fraud.” Of those who defended Andrews against the allegation of bringing false evidence, he declared, “Vain is their endeavour to wipe out the indelible stain he has fixed upon his character by his conduct in that affair. They flounder and wallow in his quagmire, and cover themselves with that dirt which before belonged to him alone.” One charge by Andrews was “ridiculous, false and absurd”; another was “abominably ridiculous and absurd” and “absolutely a stranger” to Holy Scripture. To what he judged an especially egregious lapse of logic in the prosecution’s case, Franklin responded sarcastically, “Admirable reasoning! To which I answer that

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.

Lest calling the Presbyterian clergy “asses” was insufficient insult, Franklin asserted that those involved in the Hemphill prosecution fell into three categories: “first, the men of honesty who wanted sense; secondly, the men of sense who wanted honesty; and lastly, those who had neither sense nor honesty.” The instigators of the investigation were of the last sort. “Malice, rancour and prejudice” motivated their actions; “animosity” and “false zeal” gave rise to “injustice, fraud, oppression”; the prosecution was already deep and appeared about to go deeper into “the dirt and filth of hypocrisy, falsehood and impiety.”

Franklin’s
outburst of anticlericalism was unlike him—or rather, unlike the side of him he preferred to present to the world. The sweet reasonableness with which he normally cloaked his actions withered before his anger at the suppression of a dissenting voice in the Presbyterian pulpit. In this regard the Presbyterians of Philadelphia were as closed-minded as the Puritans of Boston; the struggle over Hemphill aroused the same emotions in Franklin that had driven him from the city of his birth. He was not proud of his performance in the Hemphill case; in his autobiography he glossed it over almost to the point of prevarication.

Yet in this, as in so many other things, Franklin was a man of his times. Matters of religion were provoking people all across the American colonies to unusual emotions. During the late 1730s and early 1740s a religious eruption occurred, rending congregations from New England to the Carolinas. This “Great Awakening” grew out of the pietistic preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen among his Dutch Reformed flock in New Jersey in the 1720s, and of William and Gilbert Tennent among Presbyterians in the same province. Gilbert Tennent was a particularly compelling character: brawny, earthy, and direct. Where many other preachers appealed to the intellects of their congregants, Tennent spoke to their emotions in a language to which they were unused but which they could not resist. He preached “like a boatswain of a ship, calling the sailors to come to prayers and be damned,” said one witness, who did not
entirely approve. The sailors—congregants, rather—came, were damned, and came back for more.

Equally compelling, though in a style oratorically opposite to Tennent’s, was Jonathan Edwards. Two years older than Franklin, Edwards was an intellectual prodigy. He entered Yale before his thirteenth birthday and finished by his seventeenth. At twenty he was the head tutor at the college and, in effect, president. His early interests were as varied as those of Franklin—or more aptly, Cotton Mather—and he speculated on atoms, rainbows, and the lives of spiders. He never forgot about those spiders, but in time he narrowed his focus to the cure of the souls he inherited from his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Edwards’s devotion to his calling soon became legendary. He rose by four on summer mornings, by five in winter. He ate sparingly, to keep his mind clear and sharp. He devoted fully half of each twenty-four hours to the study of the Scriptures and other volumes conducive to holiness. He chopped wood and rode horseback for exercise, yet with each fall of the ax he reflected on Adam’s fall, and with each hill his horse ascended he thought of the uplifting power of God’s grace. Like Franklin—and Mather—he sought moral self-improvement; in his case he vowed “never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if I expected it would not be above an hour before I should hear the last trump.”

To say Edwards walked in the fear of God would be to put matters mildly (and here he walked away from Franklin); to say that he attempted to instill this same fear in his congregation would be equally bland. Unlike Gilbert Tennent or George Whitefield, Edwards spoke without gestures. His eyes did not search his audience but stayed fixed on the bell-rope at the back of the meeting hall; his words came out in a flat monotone that would have put his listeners to sleep had the message not been so hair-raising:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathesome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.

You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; it is ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to wake again in this world after you closed your eyes to sleep; and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

Edwards may have remained calm, but his auditors shrieked and moaned, their horror exceeded only by the exquisiteness of their agony. Periodically their wailing compelled the speaker to pause, lest his message be lost in the din. At least one listener was so moved that he decided to end his life rather than continue his torment. (As it happened, this lost soul was married to Edwards’s aunt Rebekah Stoddard, who showed true Stoddard grit when, informed in the buttery that her husband had fatally cut his throat, she finished her cheese work before seeing to her dead husband.)

Such excesses merely underscored the excitement the new preachers brought to the religious and social life of the colonies. The persecutions that had driven the colonial founders from England were history, and tired history, to the third and fourth generations. Meanwhile an insidious rationalism—the work of Newton and the other apostles of the Enlightenment—had driven the center of religious gravity from the bowels of believers up toward their brains. In meeting halls in every province, congregants nodded assent to received doctrines but knew that something was missing from their experience of the divine. The new preachers—the awakeners—supplied that missing element.