i9o6] ABBE— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AS METEOROLOGIST. 119 



those who never knew him personally, but in distant places and 

 distant years had heard repeated some of his pointed satires against 

 superstition, dogmatic theology, priestly craft, hypocrisy and the 

 union of church and state. To all such perversions of pure religion 

 he was a lifelong enemy. Bred for a preacher and theologian ; edu- 

 cated for the pulpit of the Church of the Puritans ; thrown by his 

 removal to Philadelphia into the companionship of honest Quakers ; 

 transferred to England to battle for Freedom from corrupt aristo- 

 cratic government with its Established Church and persecuting 

 clergy, — he, of all men, had occasion from childhood to investigate 

 the foundations of our faith ; he had learned to distinguish between 

 that natural religion that is revealed in the heart of every good man, 

 and the dogmas, forms and ceremonies by which the established 

 union of church and state was controlling a large portion of Europe, 

 England and America. His common sense rebelled "against this 

 alliance of error with power ; he would have none of it. He beHeved 

 in the Fatherhood of God ; in a religion that should be a blessing to 

 men ; in an honest statement of what we know, as distinguished 

 from what we imagine or believe. He searched the foundations 

 of his own faith as carefully as he examined into the phenomena- 

 of nature ; he applied the same rational logic to them both, and 

 sought by independent thought and clear views to emancipate his 

 friends and countrymen from abject .subserviency to dogmatic teach- 

 ers, who were, as he believed, blinded by their own ignorance, 

 fettered by conservatisms and beguiled by love of power and ease. 

 Being familiar with every line of the Holy Scriptures, far more 

 so than many of his adversaries, and knowing how they misused the 

 words of the Bible, he turned it against them, and by such satires 

 as his proposed new version of the Bible, in 1760, held up to the 

 severest public contempt the false courtiers that surrounded the king, 

 thus goading them on to further acts of injustice and selfishness. In 

 every case in which he seems to be violating all habits of reverential 

 religious thought, you will, if you understand the circumstances of 

 the occasion, find that he was, as it were, confounding his enemies 

 out of their own mouths. Read his " Shavers and Trimmers " in 

 the Pennsylvania Gazette for 1743, or the " Parable against Par- 

 sons," or the " Parable on Brotherly Love," and learn that there are 



PROC, AMER. PHIL. SOC, XLV. 183H, PRINTED OCT. 26, I906. 



