wisdom is really new, but only the expression of it; and all that of
"Poor Richard" had been fused in the crucible of Franklin's brain.

But the famous almanac was not the only pulpit whence Franklin preached
to the people. He had an excellent ideal of a newspaper. He got news
into it, which was seldom done in those days, and which made it
attractive; he got advertisements into it, which made it pay, and which
also was a novel feature; indeed, Mr. Parton says that he "originated
the modern system of business advertising;" he also discussed matters of
public interest. Thus he anticipated the modern newspaper, but in some
respects improved in advance upon that which he anticipated. He made his
"Gazette" a vehicle for disseminating information and morality, and he
carefully excluded from it "all libeling and personal abuse." The sheet
in its every issue was doing the same sort of work as "Poor Richard." In
a word, Franklin was a born teacher of men, and what he did in this way
in these his earlier days gives him rank among the most distinguished
moralists who have ever lived.

What kind of morality he taught is well known. It was human; he kept it
free from entangling alliances with any religious creed; its foundations
lay in common sense, not in faith. His own nature in this respect is
easy to understand but difficult to describe, since the words which must
be used convey such different ideas to different persons. Thus, to say
that he had the religious temperament, though he was skeptical as to all
the divine and supernatural dogmas of the religions of mankind, will
seem to many a self-contradiction, while to others it is entirely
intelligible. In his boyhood one gets a flavor of irreverence which was
slow in disappearing. When yet a mere child he suggested to his father
the convenience of saying grace over the whole barrel of salt fish, in
bulk, as the mercantile phrase would be. By the time that he was
sixteen, Shaftesbury and Collins, efficiently aided by the pious writers
who had endeavored to refute them, had made him "a real doubter in many
points of our religious doctrine;" and while he was still his brother's
apprentice in Boston, he fell into disrepute as a skeptic. Apparently he
gathered momentum in moving along this line of thought, until in England
his disbelief took on for a time an extreme and objectionable form. His
opinions then were "that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world;
and that vice and vi