s and contending sects.

There was very little moral power, in the creed he professed, to
arrest young men, of glowing passions, and exposed to the most
difficult temptations, in their downward career. No voice of Franklin
was heard with potency calling upon those who were thronging the broad
road. In a lecture upon Providence, to his companions of the Junto,
which was subsequently published, and which reflects some considerable
honor upon the earnestness of his thoughts, he wrote,

"I am especially discouraged when I reflect that you are all
my intimate pot-companions, who have heard me say a
thousand silly things in conversation, and therefore have
not that laudable partiality and veneration for whatever I
shall deliver that good people have for their spiritual
guides; that you have no reverence for my habit, nor for the
sanctity of my countenance; that you do not believe me
inspired, nor divinely assisted; and therefore will think
yourself at liberty to assert, or dissert, approve or
disapprove of anything I advance, canvassing and sifting it
as the private opinion of one of your acquaintance."

Though it was Franklin's assumption that his religion was one of works
and not of faith, still it must be admitted that his life was very
inconsistent with those principles of purity, moral loveliness and
good report which the Gospel enjoins. With his remarkable honesty of
mind, in strains which we are constrained, though with regret to
record, he writes,

"That hard-to-be governed passion of youth had hurried me
frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my
way, which were attended with some expense and great
inconvenience, besides a continual risk to my health by
distemper, which of all things I dreaded, though by great
luck I escaped it."

Mr. Parton writes, "It was perhaps owing to his frequent delinquencies
in this way, that his liturgy contains no allusion to a vice, which is
of all others the most alluring to a youth of Franklin's temperament.
He was too sincere and logical a man to go before his God and ask
assistance against a fault which he had not fully resolved to
overcome, and that immediately. About a year after the date of his
liturgy was born his illegitimate son William Franklin, who became
Governor of New Jersey. If laws were as easily executed as enacted,
Benjamin Franklin would have received, upon this oc