And buy men’s voices to commend our deeds:
It shall be said his judgment ruled our hands;
Our youths and wildness shall no whit appear,
But all be buried in his gravity.
With regard to the charge frequently made against him of scepticism and infidel leanings, Franklin’s own refutation should suffice. In a letter written in 1784 to his friend William Strahan, in England, he said, referring to the successful outcome of the Revolutionary struggle,—
“I am too well acquainted with all the springs and levers of our machine not to see that our human means were unequal to our understanding, and that, if it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined. If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a Deity. It is He that abases the proud and favors the humble. May we never forget His goodness to us, and may our future conduct manifest our gratitude!”
In a letter to Whitefield, written shortly before his death, he said,—
“I am now in my eighty-fifth year and very infirm. Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That He governs by His Providence. That He ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we can render Him is by doing good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting his conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion.”
Add to such testimony the closing lines of his famous self-written epitaph: “The work itself shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the Author.”