HKB
aided Franklin in arriving at a natural religion, it is certain that his views and even idiom received stout reinforcement from such a passage as follows from Ray's classic work:
There is no greater, at least no more palpable and convincing argument of the existence of a Deity, than the admirable act and wisdom that discovers itself in the make and constitution, the order and disposition, the ends and uses of all the parts and members of this stately fabric of heaven and earth; for if in the works of art ... a curious edifice or machine, counsel, design, and direction to an end appearing in the whole frame, and in all the several pieces of it, do necessarily infer the being and operation of some intelligent architect or engineer, why shall not also in the works of nature, that grandeur and magnificence, that excellent contrivance for beauty, order, use &c. which is observable in them, wherein they do as much transcend the effects of human art as infinite power and wisdom exceeds finite, infer the existence and efficacy of an omnipotent and all-wise Creator?[i-450]
Then he directly referred to the Archbishop of Cambray's Traité de l'existence et des attributs de Dieu. Oliver Elton observes that this work "with its appeal to popular science, is the chief counterpart in France to the 'physico-theology' current at the time in England."[i-451] From the skeleton of the smallest animal, "the bones, the tendons, the veins, the arteries, the nerves, the muscles, which compose the body of a single man"[i-452] to "this vaulted sky" which turns "around so regularly,"[i-453] all show "the infinite skill of its Author."[i-454] Although Fénelon is applying Cartesian physics, here Descartes reinforced Newtonianism; like Newton, Fénelon argued that cosmic motion is ordered by "immutable laws," so "constant and so salutary." Blackmore's Creation, a Philosophical Poem (1712), aiming to demonstrate "the existence of a God from the marks of wisdom, design, contrivance, and the choice of ends and means, which appear in the universe"[i-455] also furnished additional sanction for Franklin's emphasis on the wondrous laws of the creation and the discovery of the Deity in his Work. Like James Thomson, Blackmore seeks to show how
The long coherent chain of things we find Leads to a Cause Supreme, a wise Creating Mind.[i-456]
In revolt against the contractile elements in Calvinism, Franklin believed that God "is not offended, when he sees his Children solace themselves in any manner of pleasant exercises and Innocent Delights."[i-457] In his Articles of Belief Franklin retains from his Dissertation his a priori concept of the Deity as a creator and sustainer of "Wondrous Laws," immutable and beneficent. To the depersonalized First Mover, however, he has added "some of those Passions he has planted in us," and he suggests furthermore that the Deity is mildly providential. A maker of systematic, if inhuman, metaphysics in the Dissertation, the author of the Articles, in spite of the superficial and embryonic metaphysics, succeeds better in making himself at home in his world. To this embryonic religion (linked with Franklin's obsession with the plurality of worlds and gods--of no real significance save to indicate picturesquely the extent to which he had, with the scientists of his age, extended the limits of the physical universe) Franklin welded a pattern of ethics, prudential but stern.