A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards

a short life of jonathan edwards Silence Dogood followed this salvo with a letter two weeks later deploring hypocrisy. As in earlier pieces, she had chosen a topic that was a staple of New England sermons. Now, however, she turned the familiar theme into an attack on the close alliance between the clergy and colonial officials, who might use pious language for their own purposes. “A little religion,” she pointed out in an aphorism that still rings true, “like a little honesty, goes a great way in courts” — that is, in politics. This was especially true “if the country . . . is noted for the purity of religion.”

Jonathan Edwards would have agreed with Franklin’s views on hypocrisy in principle, even though as a son and grandson of ministers who was entering the ministry himself he was a beneficiary of New England’s political-religious establishment. In later life, even though his political instincts were conservative, he was ready to criticize magistrates who hid behind a mask of piety.

Yet if Jonathan happened to read the Courant of July 22, 1722, he may have become suspicious about the widow’s own piety. Franklin began her letter with a version of a classic New England sermonic question: “whether a commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane.” Schoolboys like Edwards debated such issues. Yet in his zeal to expose the ruin that hypocrites in public positions might bring to an entire country, Franklin minimized the dangers of open irreverence by private individuals. “A notoriously profane person in a private capacity,” Silence opined, “[only] ruins himself, and perhaps forwards the destruction of a few of his equals.”

Here, slipped in unobtrusively, was a capsule of Franklin’s life philosophy that we know so well from later writings. To Franklin it seemed self-evident that moral principles should be determined only by weighing the consequences of actions. For instance, in his Autobiography, when he recounts his early attempts at reaching “moral perfection” by following a list of virtues (such as Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, and the like), he redefines the virtue of “Chas8