iculum of every college
and high school that aspires to cultivate in its pupils a pure style
and correct literary taste.

There was one incident in Franklin's life, which, though more
frequently referred to in terms of reproach than any other, will
probably count for more in his favor in the Great Assize than any
other of his whole life. While yet in his teens he became a father
before he was a husband. He never did what men of the loftiest moral
pretensions not unfrequently do,--shirk as far as possible any
personal responsibility for this indiscretion. On the contrary, he
took the fruit of it to his home; gave him the best education the
schools of the country then afforded. When he went abroad, this son
accompanied him, was presented as his son wherever he went, was
presented in all the great houses in which he himself was received; he
entered him at the Inns of Court, and in due time had him admitted to
the English bar; made him his private secretary, and at an early age
caused him to be appointed by the Crown, Governor of New Jersey. The
father not only did everything to repair the wrong he had done his
son, but at a time when he was at the zenith of his fame and official
importance, publicly proclaimed it as one of the great errors of his
life. The world has always abounded with bastards; but with the
exception of crowned heads claiming to hold their sceptres by Divine
right, and therefore beyond the reach of popular criticism or
reproach, it would be difficult to name another parent of his
generation of anything like corresponding eminence with Franklin, who
had the courage and the magnanimity to expiate such a wrong to his
offspring so fully and effectively.

Franklin was not a member of the visible Church, nor did he ever
become the adherent of any sect. He was three years younger than
Jonathan Edwards, and in his youth heard his share of the then
prevailing theology of New England, of which Edwards was regarded, and
perhaps justly, as the most eminent exponent. The extremes to which
Edwards carried those doctrines at last so shocked the people of
Massachusetts that he was rather ignominiously expelled from his
pulpit at Northampton; and the people of Massachusetts, in very
considerable proportions, gradually wandered over into the Unitarian
communion. To Jonathan Edwards and the inflexible law of action and
reaction, more than to Priestley or any one else of their generation,
that sect owes to this day its n