"Any one who will turn over an edition of Shaftsbury, and
try to read it with the mind of this merry and receptive
printer's boy, will perceive how entirely captivating it
must have been to him. The raillery that was always the
raillery of a gentleman; the irony so delicate as really to
deceive some men who passed for acute; the fine urbanity
that pervades even the passages called severe; the genuine
reverence of the author for virtue; the spectacle revealed
of a man uniting in himself all that is good in sense, with
all that is agreeable in the man of the world,--how pleasing
it must all have been to our inky apprentice as he munched
his noon-day crust."

The practical creed of Collins and Shaftsbury, so far as it can be
gleaned from the obscurity of their brilliant pages, consisted in
the entire renunciation of all that is deemed the spirituality of
the Christian creed, and the simple enforcement of the ordinary
principles of morality in man's intercourse with his brother man. In
substance they said,

"Be truthful and honest. Do not openly oppose the
institutions of Christianity, for that will render you
obnoxious to your neighbors. Conform to the ordinary usages
of the society in the midst of which you move; and as to
creeds, let them alone as unworthy of a moment's thought."

Franklin, at sixteen years of age, became a thorough convert to these
views. He was virtually without any God. He had no rule of life but
his own instincts; but those instincts were of a high order,
emboldening his character and restraining him from all vulgar vice.
Thus he wandered for many years; though there are many indications of
an occasionally troubled mind, and though he at times struggled with
great eagerness to obtain a higher state of moral perfection, he
certainly never developed the character of a warm-hearted and devoted
follower of Jesus.[4]

[Footnote 4: "For some years he wandered in heathenish darkness.
He forsook the safe and good though narrow way of his forefathers,
and of his father and mother, and his gentle Uncle Benjamin, without
finding better and larger ways of his own. He was in danger of
becoming a castaway or a commonplace successful man of the world.
He found in due time, after many trials, and much suffering and
many grievous errors, that the soul of a man does not thrive
upon negations, and that, in very truth a man must