1779] RE.V. WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. I9 



We have stated in our former volume,* upon Dr. Smith's own 

 authority, that, from private animosity towards Dr. Smith, and 

 pohtical disHke of the Penns, who were hberal patrons of the Col- 

 lege, Dr. Franklin, while in England, in 1764, had represented to 

 sundry dissenters that the College was " a narrow, bigoted institu- 

 tion," put into the hands of the Proprietary party as an engine of 

 government; that the dissenters had no influence in it — although, 

 as Dr. Smith observed, all the professors in it but himself were 

 Dissenters — that the College had no occasion to ask assistance 

 from abroad, and that the country and province would readily 

 support it if it were not for the things above stated ; and that Dr. 

 Franklin, w^ith virulence, had made many other representations 

 grievously reflecting upon the principal persons concerned in the 

 Institution. 



I have shown how false and how much inspired by personal and 

 political animosities were these statements of the great philosopher. 



Coming from a man so well known and regarded by so many 

 persons as one of impartiality, the statements were not without a 

 pernicious and, as we shall see, a lasting effect ; one, indeed, as we 

 may admit, greatly beyond — both in the matter of duration and 

 effect — what Dr. Franklin himself — whose object was doubtless 

 confined to thwarting Dr. Smith and to injuring the Penns and 

 their friends in Philadelphia — at all designed or anticipated. 



At the outbreak of the Revolution the Trustees of the College 

 were composed of a body of gentlemen, the very first in point of 

 birth, property, education, intelligence, integrity, and honor to be 

 found in the city of Philadelphia. While they were not hast}' in 

 rushing into a revolution, they were just as far, as a whole, from 

 aiding, abetting, or approving the illegal acts or purposes of the 

 British ministry. And this same state of disposition, it may be 

 affirmed with truth, characterized the body of the best people of 

 Philadelphia. 



But there was in Pennsylvania a violent party, distinguished by 

 a proscriptive policy, in the eyes of which every man who was not 

 ready to rush into revolution was a Tory, and which, to use the 

 language of Horace Binney, " implicated every such person in a 

 lesser or greater treason, like the bye and the main of Sir Walter 

 Raleigh and his friends." 



* Vol. I., p. 336. 



