HKB
result of the Deity "who always acts geometrically." Borrowing from Cockburne, Ray, Bentley, and Fénelon, Derham offers likewise to prove the existence and operations of the Workman from his Work.[i-402]
It is unlikely that Boyle's Lectures (characterized by orthodox rationalism, augmented by Newtonianism) would alone have precipitated in Franklin a "thorough deism." Not improbably Locke, Shaftesbury, and Anthony Collins (whom Franklin mentions reading) were most militant in overthrowing his inherited bibliolatry. Although he does not say exactly which of Collins's works he read, Collins's rationale is repeated clearly enough in any one of his pieces. Warring against "crack-brain'd Enthusiasts," the "prodigious Ignorance" and "Impositions of Priests," against defective scriptural texts, Collins defends "our natural Notions" against the authoritarianism of priests. Vilifying the authority of the surplice, he apotheosizes the authority of reason.[i-403] He intensifies the English tradition of every-man-his-own-priest, and exclaims "How uncertain Tradition is!"[i-404] From this militant friend of John Locke, Franklin was doubtless impregnated with an odium theologicum and an exalted idea of the sanctity of Reason.
Having read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,[i-405] Franklin may have remembered that Locke there observed, "Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do."[i-406] Like Collins, Locke urged a deistic rationale:
Since then the precepts of Natural Religion are plain, and very intelligible to all mankind, and seldom to come to be controverted; and other revealed truths, which are conveyed to us by books and languages, are liable to the common and natural obscurities and difficulties incident to words; methinks it would become us to be more careful and diligent in observing the former, and less magisterial, positive, and imperious, in imposing our own sense and interpretations of the latter.[i-407]
In addition Franklin may have been influenced by Locke's implied Newtonianism; he would suspect the subtleties of the Old South Church when he read: "For the visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of the creation, that a rational creature, who will but seriously reflect on them, cannot miss the discovery of a Deity."[i-408] Like Newton, Locke inferred an infinite and benevolent Geometrician from "the magnificent harmony of the universe."
Franklin also read Shaftesbury's Characteristics, which Warburton quotes Pope as saying "had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of infidelity put together."[i-409] Although he may have pondered over Shaftesbury's "virtuoso theory of Benevolence," he was not one to be readily convinced of the innate altruism of man. His Puritan heritage linked with an empirical realism prevented him from becoming prey to Shaftesbury's a priori optimism. He was aware of the potential danger of a complacent trust in natural impulses, which often lead to
The love of sweet security in sin.
To what extent did Franklin's nascent humanitarianism--mildly provoked by the neighborliness of Mather and Defoe--receive additional sanction from Shaftesbury's doctrine that "compassion is the supreme form of moral beauty, the neglect of it the greatest of all offenses against nature's ordained harmony"?[i-410] Identifying self-love and social, Shaftesbury saw the divine temper achieved through affection for the public, the "universal good."[i-411] Born among men who were convinced of the supremacy of scripture, Franklin would at first be astonished (then perhaps liberated) upon reading in the Characteristics that "Religion excludes only perfect atheism."[i-412] From such a piece as Shaftesbury's An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit Franklin learned that not all men preserved a union between theology and ethics, scripture and religion. Although Shaftesbury occasionally indicated a reverence for sacred scriptures, the totality of his thought was cast in behalf of natural religion. He was convinced that the "Deity is sufficiently revealed through natural Phenomena."[i-413] Extolling the apprehension of the Deity through man's uniform reason, Shaftesbury urbanely lampooned enthusiasm, that private revelation which threatened to prevail against the consensus gentium.