Read Arguably: Selected Essays for Free Online Page A

appreciate that in youth, at least in prose, he had been quite a good female impersonator. So that’s one mask off.
    In his Persecution and the Art of Writing , which I am assuming Professor Weinberger knows almost by heart, Leo Strauss made the surprisingly unesoteric observation that the best way to avoid the wrath of the censor is to present an apparently balanced debate in which the views of the side disliked by the censor are given a “straight” denunciation. Only a little subtlety is required to make these views slightly more attractive than the censor might wish. And many are those who have been seduced, or disillusioned, in this manner, even by debates into which no conscious “twist” has been inserted. (De Vries’s novel also contains a hilarious scene in which the town atheist and the town clergyman have a public argument and succeed in completely winning each other over.)
    That Franklin had the necessary cast of mind for this dialectic is not to be doubted. He even tells us himself, with an open and friendly face,
Some Books against Deism fell into my Hands; they were said to be the Substance of Sermons preached at Boyle’s Lectures. It happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much Stronger than the Refutations.
     
    But Franklin isn’t done with the reader quite yet. He gives an account of a Deism in which it is quite impossible that he believed. Or is it true that he ever “from the Attributes of God, his infinite Wisdom, Goodness & Power concluded that nothing could possibly be wrong in the World, & that Vice & Virtue were empty Distinctions, no such Things existing”? Everything in his life and writing argues against this likelihood, and Weinberger wittily appends a note on how to distinguish between “dry,” “wet,” and “very wet” Deism. Only the ultra-dry Deists denied human beings all free will, and even then the idea that the world was as good as it possibly could be was dependent on the fatalistic and tautological conviction that it was, ex hypothesi , the only possible world in the first place. Franklin was never a Pangloss, and his bald statement of what such a belief would entail is the equal of Voltaire’s.
    He seems to have disclosed his true ambition only by appearing to disown or abandon it. At about the midpoint of the Autobiography , having already familiarized us with his suspicion of all established churches, he relates his intention, in 1731, of setting the world to rights by establishing a “Party for Virtue.” This would form the “Virtuous and good Men of all Nations” into “a regular Body, to be govern’d by suitable good and wise Rules.” This apparently platitudinous project was to involve a “creed,” which would comprise “the Essentials of every known Religion” while “being free of every thing that might shock the Professors of any Religion.” This was as much as to say that a frontal disagreement with the godly was not to be entertained: an unsurprising proposition in that or any other epoch. The party’s manifesto included some ecumenical boilerplate about one God, divine providence, and the reward of virtue and punishment of vice “either here or hereafter” (my italics), but its point of distinction lay in the clause stipulating that “the most acceptable Service of God is doing Good to Man.” Having laid out this essentially humanist appeal with some care over a couple of pages, Franklin writes with diffidence that the pressure of other work led him to postpone it indefinitely. Weinberger believes, to the contrary, that he made this project his unostentatious life’s work, always seeking to unite men of science and reason, and even, if rather belatedly, abandoning his pro-slavery position and becoming an advocate of emancipation. There is good evidence that he is right. Franklin’s decision to become a Freemason,