undertake and go on with it, to the lasting advantage and enriching of
the family.

About the year 1734 there arrived among us from Ireland a young
Presbyterian preacher, named Hemphill, who delivered with a good
voice, and apparently extempore, most excellent discourses, which drew
together considerable numbers of different persuasions, who join'd in
admiring them. Among the rest, I became one of his constant hearers,
his sermons pleasing me, as they had little of the dogmatical kind,
but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue, or what in the
religious stile are called good works. Those, however, of our
congregation, who considered themselves as orthodox Presbyterians,
disapprov'd his doctrine, and were join'd by most of the old clergy,
who arraign'd him of heterodoxy before the synod, in order to have him
silenc'd. I became his zealous partisan, and contributed all I could
to raise a party in his favour, and we combated for him awhile with
some hopes of success. There was much scribbling pro and con upon the
occasion; and finding that, tho' an elegant preacher, he was but a
poor writer, I lent him my pen and wrote for him two or three
pamphlets, and one piece in the Gazette of April, 1735. Those
pamphlets, as is generally the case with controversial writings, tho'
eagerly read at the time, were soon out of vogue, and I question
whether a single copy of them now exists.[76]

[76] See "A List of Books written by, or relating to
Benjamin Franklin," by Paul Leicester Ford. 1889. p.
15.--Smyth.

During the contest an unlucky occurrence hurt his cause exceedingly.
One of our adversaries having heard him preach a sermon that was much
admired, thought he had somewhere read the sermon before, or at least
a part of it. On search, he found that part quoted at length, in one
of the British Reviews, from a discourse of Dr. Foster's.[77] This
detection gave many of our party disgust, who accordingly abandoned
his cause, and occasion'd our more speedy discomfiture in the synod. I
stuck by him, however, as I rather approv'd his giving us good sermons
composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, tho' the
latter was the practice of our common teachers. He afterward
acknowledg'd to me that none of those he preach'd were his own;
adding, that his memory was such as enabled him to retain and repeat
any sermon after one reading only. On our defeat, he left us in search
elsewhere of better fortune, and I q