ial world, skillful
to trace its secrets, fertile to apply them to human use. He was a
pioneer and founder of the new nation, projecting its union before others
had desired or dreamed of it; sharing in its first hazardous fortunes;
winning by his personal weight and wisdom the foreign alliance which
turned the scale of victory; laying with the other master shipwrights the
keel and ribs of the new Constitution. Moral perfection for himself,
and, as the outcome to the world, not a new church or a theology or a
missionary enterprise, but a winning of the forces of nature to the
service of man, and a shaping of the social organism for the benefit of
all. That is the originality of Franklin,--that he carries the old moral
purpose into the new fields of science and of social ordering. His
desire for moral perfection and his confidence that the universe is
ordered rightly are not dependent on any visionary scheme of heaven and
hell; they rest not on any doubtful argument; they bring sanction from no
transport mixed of soul and sense. He walks firm on the solid earth. He
has found for himself that goodness is the only thing that satisfies.
That this is an ordered universe comes home to him with every step of his
study of actuality. What need of a supernatural religion to a man who
finds religion in his own nature and in the nature of the world?

Such confidence and such purpose are as old as Socrates. But come, now,
let us go where Socrates did not go; let us put the ideas of Jesus and
Paul to some further application; let us use our freedom from pope and
tyrant for some solid good! And so he goes on, cheerfully and
delightedly, to question the thunder-cloud and make acquaintance with its
wild steeds,--presently some one will put them in harness. He is always
inventing. Now it is a stove, now it is a fire-brigade,--a public
library,--a post-office,--a Federal Union! And be his invention smaller
or greater, he takes out no patent, but tenders it freely into the common
stock.

The prophets introducing this age are Carlyle and Emerson. Carlyle sees
the disease--he convinces of sin. Emerson sees the solution. Carlyle
reflects in his own troubled nature the disorder he portrays. He is
physically unsound; his dyspepsia exaggerates to him the evils of the
world. Emerson's disciplined and noble character mirrors the present and
eternal order, and forecasts its triumph.

Carlyle and Emerson give two different phases