4 - On the Providence of God in the Government of the World

Summary

Following his 1728 “Articles,” and his October 1729 acquisition of the Gazette, Franklin wrote and selected numerous articles on religion that challenged the veracity of claims to revelatory knowledge. This interpretation may be contrasted with the view that Franklin never resolved the question of providence in his own mind, and that his public life reveals either an unreflective moralism or a vocation grounded not in reason but in a pious leap of faith. It also demonstrates that Franklin took revelation's challenge to reason seriously: he did not accept the answer as self-evident, nor did he embrace an agnostic view with regard to revealed religion.

Materialist arguments against the possibility of spirits—similar to the ones Franklin had made in the Dissertation—appeared in the April 16, 1730, Mercury. Franklin replied with two essays, the April 23 “Letter of the Drum” and in a May 7 letter by “Philoclerus.” In the first, the author claimed to refute “Spinosists, Hobbists, and most impious Free-Thinkers, who despise Revelation,” deny “the Existence of the Devil, and of Spirits in general,” as well as the authority of Scripture that affirms them, with a burlesque of an actual story of a spirit that made drumming noises. The author's evidence is similar to that found in the miracles of the Bible: a secondhand account from a minister, who inferred the existence of a spirit on hearing the sound of a drum. The author's spoof suggests that a better explanation is fear, which works mass delusions and blinds ministers to evidence from their own experience. Even the future bishop who, believing his fellow ministers were fibbing or drunk, pranked his colleagues by making noises on the second night worked himself into such a frenzy that he became too afraid to return to his own bed. The atheist suggests that knowledge of the physical world disproves the spirit world: practical jokes and dreams are the sole origins of the gods. He concludes with a story of a drunken prelate in Jamaica who read from Scripture, “I heard a Voice from Heaven,” at which his drinking companion replies, “that's a d[am]’d Lye, for … if you had heard the Voice, I should have heard it too, for my Ears are as good as yours.”