Page:Benjamin Franklin, self-revealed; a biographical and critical study based mainly on his own writings (IA cu31924092892177).pdf/43



or in those other words from the same strains of supernal melody,

"If Virtue feeble were

Heaven itself would stoop to her."

In teaching and pursuing a system of morals, which was nothing but a scheme of enlightened selfishness, dependent for its aliment upon pecuniary ease and habit, he was simply faithful to a general conception of life and character entirely too earthbound and grovelling to satisfy those higher intuitions and ideals which, be the hard laws of our material being what they may, not only never permit our grosser natures to be at peace, but reject with utter disdain the suggestion that they and our vices and infirmities are but offshoots of the same parent stock of selfishness. It cannot be denied that, as a general rule, a man with some money is less urgently solicited to commit certain breaches of the moral law than a man with none, or that we should be in a bad way, indeed, if we did not have the ply of habit as well as the whisper of conscience to assist us in the struggle between good and evil that is ever going on in our own breasts. But the limited freedom from temptation, secured by the possession of money, and the additional capacity for resisting temptation, bred by good habits, are, it is hardly necessary to say, foundations too frail to support alone the moral order of the universe. Beyond money, however conducive it may be in some respects to diminshed temptation, there must be somthing to sweeten the corruption influence of money. Beyond good habits, however desirable as aids to virtue, there must be something to create and sustain good habits. This thing no Rh