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transcendent illumination; Edwards clouded the freedom of the will with doubts upon its self-determining power. The style of Butler is dense and compact; that of Edwards, redundant and diffuse. Butler's books consist of a few hundred pages, Edwards' books fill two or three thousand, and his unpublished manuscripts are enormously voluminous. Butler lived a single life. Edwards had a wife of rare piety and grace, reared a large family, and his descendants have been princes and giants in the land. Butler was in stations of affluence and dignity, enjoyed the favor of nobility and crown, but lived in austere simplicity; Edwards was ejected from a large and wealthy parish, and retired to a mission among the Stockbridge Indians until the last year of his life when he became president of the college at Princeton. The writings of Edwards have given occasion to much controversy, and many of his theories rank with exploded speculations. Butler's writings still win growing favor from generation to generation.

These godly men were separated by wastes of ocean, but their lives and labors commingled for the advancement of truth and the improvement of the world. I have found but one reference to Butler in Edwards' writings.1

When the advancement of Bishop Butler to the rich see of Durham was proposed to him, it was accompanied with an

1 "I have in my possession a copy of Dr. Samuel Clarke's 'Demonstration, etc., etc.,' to which is appended the correspondence between Dr. Clarke and Butler. Pres. Edwards quotes certain words of Dr. Clarke printed in this edition of Clarke's Demonstration. I presume that Edwards read these letters of Butler, as he was much interested in the subject upon which Butler corresponded with Clarke. I have wondered that Edwards did not give more evidence of his acquaintance with Butler's Analogy, still, I have supposed that he studied the work, and that he modified some of his statements in consequence of that study. He was habitually sparing of quotations. I have regretted that he did not make more quotations than he has made from the Analogy."

EDWARDS A. PARK, April 3, 1897 (Manuscript letter).

intimation that he should give away a preferment. To this he at once demurred; he said, "This gave me greater disturbance of mind than, I think, I ever felt." It shocked him that such a thing should be asked of him. "I durst not trust myself to talk upon the subject," he said; "I could not take any Church promotion upon the condition of any such promise or intimation. Bishops take the oaths against simony, and as I should think an express promise of preferment to a patron beforehand, an express breach of that oath, so I should think a tacit promise a tacit breach of it. I think myself bound, whatever the consequences of my simplicity and openness, to add that it will be impossible for me to do it consistently with my character and honor."

Upon his removal to Durham he laid out plans for great repairs upon the cathedral and at the same time he "felt the burlesque," as he wrote to a friend, "of being employed in this manner at my time of life." He added, "But whether I am to do what seems put upon me to do, or at least to begin, whether I am to live to complete any or all of them, is not my concern."

The next year the good bishop died leaving lessons of wisdom and instruction for "the life that now is, and for that which is to come," which shall survive when marble and stones have crumbled into dust.

XXX

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

The Two-Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth, January 17, 1906

Wisdom is the principal thing. ·PROV. 4: 7.

EN of mind and virtue who have done great things in their

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time are the beacon-lights of history. Without Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, there could be no Jewish history; without Homer,Solon, Socrates, Pericles, no Greek history; without Numa, Brutus, Julius Cæsar, Cicero, no Roman history; without Alfred the Great, Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, no English history; without Captain John Smith, the Pilgrim Fathers, William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, no American history. Of all these no one, perhaps, is more worthy of commemoration than the printer, patriot, economist, postmaster general, philosopher, philanthropist, statesman, sage, who was born on the 17th day of January, 1706. Few men have done so much for their own country or for the world at large. He was born earlier than his great contemporaries, Washington and Jefferson, and without his preparatory work Jefferson had not written the Declaration of Independence, nor without his influence could Washington have become the Father of his Country.

Franklin had laid the foundation of his character, and gained the mastery of himself, and had commenced the publication of "Poor Richard's Almanac," before Washington was born. Jefferson was born eleven years afterward. When he wrote the Declaration, he was thirty-three years of age, and Franklin stood

by his side and aided him with the wisdom of an old man of seventy years. When Washington, at the age of fifty-five presided over the convention that framed our form of government, Franklin in his eighty-second year was a member and gave his sagacious counsels and his firm support to the Constitution that made us a nation. At one time and another in the course of heated debates he had misgivings as to the result, and, looking at the sun which was painted upon the wall behind Washington's chair, he said that he could not tell whether it was a rising or a setting sun; but when the work was done, he said: "I have the happiness to know that it is a rising, not a setting sun." So now it is our happiness, after many years, to see the vision fulfilled, the sun shining over the continent from ocean to ocean upon a free and happy people united under one form of government. There has never been the like in any former age. Westward the star of Bethlehem has taken its way. It shines brighter now and here than when it appeared to the wise men in the Syrian sky. As Christianity rests upon the three chief apostles, Peter, Paul, and John, so the American republic rests upon Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson, the three strong pillars of the state. In the struggle to throw off the British yoke we could hardly have succeeded without the French alliance, and for that alliance we are mainly indebted to the influence and agency of Benjamin Franklin. His pure and splendid character was taken as representative of the American people, and won for our cause the cordial and generous support of the French nation. Let us go back two hundred years and observe the foundations of this life of honor and renown.

One of the youngest in a family of seventeen children, after a few years at school he was put to work. He learned the printer's trade, made himself master of it, and continued in it as his lifework until after he was an editor, a publisher of books and pamphlets, and of "Poor Richard's Almanac" for twenty-five

years, besides being engaged in a variety of public offices and

services.

In restless youth he sometimes went astray; but he reproved and corrected himself, gained wisdom from his own folly, and made the art of virtue a study and delight. He mentions among other books which he read, that interested and informed his mind, Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates, Plutarch's Lives, Addison's Spectator, Locke on the Human Understanding, and Cotton Mather's "Essay to Do Good." Of the latter book he said that "it gave such a turn to his thinking as to have an influence on his conduct through life, on some of its principal events, and that if he had been a useful citizen, the public owed all the advantage of it to that book." He made a catalogue of the virtues, examined his own conduct, noted down his faults and, though he never arrived at the perfection he was ambitious of, he said in his seventy-ninth year that he owed to this endeavor, with the blessing of God, that he was a happier and better man than he otherwise would have been, and he spoke with gratitude of “the constant felicity of his life." He always cherished the cardinal principles of religion, the existence and government and providence of God, the rewards of virtue and the punishment of vice, either here or hereafter, and that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man. Brought up in piety he held the memory of his Puritan ancestry in sacred regard and took pains to trace it out when in England to the days of persecution under Queen Mary, but his mind revolted at the hard and harsh dogmas of predestination and reprobation for more amiable and reasonable views of the Supreme Being. In Philadelphia he now and then attended the Presbyterian meeting, once for five successive Sundays, and he regularly paid his annual subscription for its support, but the preacher's discourses, he says, were solemn arguments, explanations of peculiar doctrines, dry, uninteresting and unedifying, not inculcating a single moral principle, their

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