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moral natures. In many religious ceremonies of the Orient, religion is
purely an emotion, an exaltation of the nerves, accompanied at times by
outbreaking immorality; and unfortunately the same phenomena have been
too often seen in our own land. This emotional element is always
connected with the imagination and with belief in some form of
revelation. The other element of religion is the law of morality which
has been taught the world over by true philosophers, and which depends
at last on the simple feeling that a man should to a certain varying
extent sacrifice his personal advantage for the good of the community.
Now the deists of the eighteenth century, of whom Voltaire was the
great champion, denied revelation and sought to banish the emotions
from religion. They believed in a God who manifested himself in the
splendid pageantry of nature, and this they called natural revelation.
They laid especial emphasis on morality, but in their attempt to sever
morals from enthusiasm (_enthousiasmos_, god-in-us) they too often
reduced human life to a barren formula. From this brief account it will
be seen how naturally Franklin, with his parentage and particular
genius, fell a prey to the teachings of Shaftesbury.

After a little while, however, he began to notice that certain of his
friends who protested most loudly against religion were quite
untrustworthy in their morals as well. Moreover he attributed several
_errata_ of his own early life to lack of religious principles, and to
remedy this defect he now undertook--deliberately if we may credit his
later confessions--to build up a religion of his own. There is, one
must acknowledge, something grotesque in this endeavor to supply the
warmth of the emotional imagination by the use of cold reason, and had
Franklin possessed less wit and more humor he would never have fallen
into such bathos. The little book still exists in which Franklin wrote
out his creed and private liturgy. The creed expresses a belief in "one
Supreme, most perfect Being, Author and Father of the gods themselves."
Finding this God to be infinitely above man's comprehension, our
religionist goes on to say: "I conceive, then, that the Infinite has
created many beings or gods vastly superior to man, who can better
conceive his perfections than we, and return him a more rational and
glorious praise.... It may be these created gods are immortal; or it
may be that, after many ages, they are changed, and other