According to his own account, it appears that Ben was often haunted with fears that he himself had some hand in Ralph's disasters. Dr. Franklin was certainly one of the wisest of mankind. But with all his wisdom he was still but a man, and therefore liable to err. Solomon, we know, was fallible; what wonder then young Franklin?
But here lies the difference between these two wise men, as to their errors. Solomon, according to scripture, was sometimes overcome of Satan, even in the bone and sinew of his strength; but the devil was too hard for Franklin only while he was in the _gristle_ of his youth. The case was thus: among the myriads of books which came to his eager tooth, there was a most unlucky one on deism, written, 'tis said, by Shaftesbury, a man admirably calculated to pervert the truth; or, as Milton says of one of his fallen spirits, to make "_the worse appear the better reason_." Mark now this imposing writer--he does not utter you a word against religion; not he indeed: no, not for the world. Why, sirs, he's the best friend of religion. He praises it up to the skies, as the sole glory of man, the strong pillar of his virtues, and the inexhaustible fountain of all his hopes. But then he cannot away with that false religion, that detestable superstition called christianity. And here, to set his readers against it, he gives them a most horrible catalogue of the cruelties and bloody persecutions it has always occasioned in the world; nay, he goes so far as to assert that christians are the _natural enemies of mankind_; "vainly conceiting themselves," says he, "to be the favourites of heaven, they look on the rest of the world but as 'heathen dogs' whom it is 'doing God service to kill,' and whose goods it is right to seize on, as spoil for the Lord's people! Who," he asks crowingly, "filled Asia with fire and sword in the bloody wars of the Crusades? The christians. Who depopulated the fine negro-coasts of Africa? The christians. Who extirpated many of the once glorious Indian nations of America? The christians; nay," continues he, "so keen are those christians for blood, that when they can't get their 'heathen dogs' to fall on, they fall on one another: witness the papist christians destroying the protestants, and the protestant christians destroying the papists. And still greater shame," says he, "to these sweet followers of the Lamb, these papist and protestant christians, when they can no longer worry each other, will worry those of their own party, as in numberless and shameful cases of the calvinists and arminians; nay, so prone are the christians to hate, that their greatest doctors even in their _pulpits_, instead of exhorting to piety and those godlike virtues, that make men honour and love one another, will fix on the vainest speculations; which, though not understood by one soul among them, yet serve abundantly to set them all by the ears; yes, they can hate one another: