Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/203

 Rh in explaining abroad the actual condition and views of the average American. His solid merits and unusual tact made him a great favorite in France, where, as commissioner for the colonies, he attained a personal popularity which was of the greatest advantage to his country. In spite of some loss of reputation from the suspicion that he had not always used his privileges unselfishly, Franklin returned to America to spend his last years in a position of honor not much below that of Washington himself.

FRANKLIN'S MORALS AND RELIGION Such eminence was not achieved without the most careful management. Indeed, the fact that most strongly impresses a reader of Franklin's "Autobiography" is the astonishing degree to which he regulated his acts and developed his character by a system of what, in the language of our day, might almost be termed "scientific management." For example, he drew up, as many others have done, a list of virtues and of precepts for attaining them. Then, apparently untroubled by any suspicion that what he was doing was at all funny, he kept a tabular record which showed, week by week, how good a score he was making in the important game of living a moral life. His entire attitude toward life was of this prudential sort. Sins which would have prostrated a Puritan in the fear of eternal torment are to Franklin a matter of regret because of their expense and their injurious effect upon his health. Virtue he seems to have regarded chiefly as a means to the favor of man. The favor of God, which the Puritan implored in fasts and vigils, Franklin tranquilly expected as the outcome of a life regulated by prudence and virtue. "Having experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long life," he wrote to President Stiles of Yale, "I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness."

JOHN WOOLMAN'S RELIGION Strikingly different in almost every respect are the life and aims of John Woolman. "There was a care on my mind," he writes, "so to pass my time that nothing might hinder me from the most steady