Note i-416 — INTRODUCTION (continued 2)

See S. Bloore, "Samuel Keimer. A Footnote to the Life of Franklin," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LIV, 255-87 (July, 1930), and "Samuel Keimer," in Dictionary of American Biography, X, 288-9. In 1724 Samuel Keimer (probably with Franklin's aid) reprinted Gordon and Trenchard's The Independent Whig. (See W. J. Campbell's A Short-Title Check List of all the Books, Pamphlets, Broadsides, known to have been printed by Benjamin Franklin.) Franklin also was acquainted with their Cato's Letters, having helped to set up parts from it while working on the New England Courant. The Independent Whig emphasizes humanitarian morality rather than theological dogma, morality which "prompts us to do good to all Men, and to all Men alike" (London, 1721, xlviii). It is fearful of metaphysical vagaries (p. 26). Warring against priests and their "Monkey Tricks at Church" (p. 165)—"One Drop of Priestcraft is enough to contaminate the Ocean" (p. 168)—it sets up a violent antithesis between reason and authority (p. 212), declaring that "we must judge from Scripture what is Orthodoxy" but "we must judge from Reason, what is Scripture" (p. 276). Tilting at a Deity "revengeful, cruel, capricious, impotent, vain, fond of Commendation and Flattery," exalting an "All-powerful, All-wise, and All-merciful God" (p. 413), The Independent Whig, like Franklin's Articles, suggests that "it is absurd to suppose, that we can direct the All-wise Being in the Dispensation of his Providence; or can flatter or persuade him out of his eternal Decrees" (p. 436). In Cato's Letters (3rd ed., 4 vols., London, 1733), which were tremendously popular in the American colonies, Franklin could have read that "The People have no Biass to be Knaves" (I, 178), that man "cannot enter into the Rationale of God's punishing all Mankind for the Sin of their first Parents, which they could not help" (IV, 38), "That we cannot provoke him, when we intend to adore him; that the best Way to serve him, is to be serviceable to one another" (IV, 103). Jesus instituted a natural religion, a worship of One Immutable God, free from priests, sacrifices, and ceremonies, in which one shows through "doing Good to men" his adoration for God (IV, 265-6). Here are observations which could easily have reinforced Franklin's deistic rationale. For interesting evidence of further deistic and rationalistic works available to Franklin, see L. C. Wroth's An American Bookshelf, 1755.