Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Printer and the Preacher:
George Whitefield, Benjamin Franklin,
and the Gospel for the Skeptic
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Of all the friendships of my life — and God gave me many, on both sides of the Atlantic, across thirty-five years of itinerant ministry — none has fascinated the world more than the one I shared with Benjamin Franklin. And I understand why. It appears, on the surface, to be a contradiction in terms: a friendship between the most famous evangelical preacher of the eighteenth century and the most famous religious skeptic of the same era. A man who crossed the Atlantic thirteen times to cry to millions that they must be born again, and a man who had reduced his religious convictions to a bare Deism that acknowledged a Creator but rejected nearly everything else that Christianity claims about Him. A voice from the pulpit and a voice from the printing press, pulling in opposite directions on the most important questions any human being can face.
And yet we were close friends. Genuinely, warmly, persistently close friends, across three decades and hundreds of miles of ocean, across every theological disagreement and every practical collaboration, across the long arc of two remarkable lives that happened to intersect in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1739 and never entirely separated after that. The friendship was real. It was not a polite professional arrangement between a content producer and his publisher. It was a genuine personal affection, a mutual regard, a shared enjoyment of each other's company and conversation that neither of us, as far as I can tell, ever wished to be without.
I want to tell you about that friendship in this chapter — honestly, fully, with all its remarkable qualities and its one great unresolved tension — because I believe it teaches things about the Gospel, about friendship, about the patient love that Christian witness requires, and about the mystery of God's sovereignty in human relationships that no amount of abstract theology can quite convey. I also want to use it as an entry point into a broader conversation about how the Gospel reaches the educated and the skeptical — the people who are too intelligent and too honest to be moved by religious performance, but who have not yet been moved by the one thing that could actually reach them.
Benjamin Franklin was, in his own estimation and in mine, a great man. Not merely in the way the world uses that term — though he was great in that way too, a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts, boundless curiosity, practical genius, and the kind of character that compels respect from everyone who encounters it regardless of their own views. He was great in a deeper sense: he was a man who took serious things seriously, who did not settle for comfortable answers to important questions, who applied to everything he touched the same fierce, honest, disciplined intelligence that made him one of the finest minds of his century. I admired him. I admired him sincerely, in the way that a person of genuine conviction can admire someone who holds different convictions, when that person holds their different convictions with integrity and intelligence and without malice. (Proverbs 27:17 KJV): "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." Franklin sharpened me. Not theologically — he did not convince me of anything I had not already believed. But intellectually, in terms of how I thought about communication and persuasion and the use of media and the reach of a message, our friendship made me better at what I was called to do. And I prayed constantly that I might, in return, be used by God to reach him.
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How Two Such Men Became Friends
The friendship began, as so many things in my ministry began, in Philadelphia. I arrived there in the autumn of 1739 on my second American tour, and Philadelphia was already the publishing center of colonial America. Benjamin Franklin was its most prominent printer — a man whose Pennsylvania Gazette reached more readers than any other periodical in the colonies, whose press turned out almanacs and political pamphlets and religious tracts and everything in between, and who had a keen businessman's eye for the difference between content that people would seek out and content they would pass by.
Franklin was not a Christian. He had been raised in a Reformed household in Boston, had absorbed the theological frameworks of his upbringing, and had then, in the intellectual ferment of a mind too questioning to accept anything uncritically, moved away from orthodox Christianity toward what he himself described as a kind of Deism — a belief in a benevolent Creator who had made the world according to rational laws and then, more or less, left it to run itself, with human virtue and human wisdom as the primary means of improvement. He prayed occasionally, in a general way, and he believed in some form of divine Providence. But the specific, concrete, personally demanding claims of the Christian Gospel — that God took on human flesh, that He died for sinners, that those sinners must be personally converted and personally obedient — these he found intellectually unconvincing and practically unnecessary.
A less perceptive printer than Franklin might have dismissed the revival preaching as too controversial to profit from or too religious to attract a broad readership. Franklin was neither less perceptive nor less commercially shrewd than that. He recognized immediately that whatever one thought of the theological content of my preaching, the social phenomenon of the Great Awakening was news of the most compelling kind, and that publishing accounts of it — my journals, my sermons, my letters — would find an audience among the many thousands of colonial Americans who were caught up in what was happening, either as participants or as observers. He became my printer. And in becoming my printer, he became something far more important than a commercial partner.
He came to hear me preach. I know this for certain because he described the experience in detail and with characteristic precision. He came, by his own account, not to be converted — he was perfectly clear that he had no expectation or intention of having his views altered — but to observe the phenomenon. To hear what was producing such extraordinary responses in such large numbers of people. To understand, from the inside, what was happening in these fields and squares and commons that was drawing tens of thousands of ordinary colonists away from their ordinary lives and reducing hard men to tears.
What he heard impressed him profoundly, though he was careful to frame his impression in characteristically Franklinian terms — not as spiritual conviction but as aesthetic and intellectual admiration. He observed the power of my delivery. He noted the clarity of the argument. He admired — with the frank appreciation of a fellow communicator who understood the craft — the way I structured a sermon to carry an audience from comfortable disengagement to personal confrontation without ever letting them fully see the structure doing its work. He was, in short, a very good audience: honest about what moved him, honest about what left him unpersuaded, honest about the limits of his own honesty.
And then there was the famous test. Franklin, being Franklin, could not simply listen to the sermon — he had to measure it. He walked back from the meeting he attended, pacing off the distance from where I had been preaching and calculating, from the geometry of the angles and the known physics of sound, how far my voice had carried. His conclusion: approximately thirty thousand people could have heard me clearly in the open air on that occasion. He published this observation. It was not an endorsement of the theological content — he was scrupulous about that distinction. But it was a verification of the extraordinary physical reach of what was happening, stated with the authority of a man who had no stake in exaggerating it. (Proverbs 22:29 KJV): "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men." Franklin was diligent in his business — the business of observing and publishing and communicating — and he applied that diligence to the revival with the same honest precision he applied to everything else. I was grateful for it. The measured, scientifically grounded testimony of a man like Franklin was worth more to the ministry, in terms of its public credibility, than the enthusiastic endorsement of a dozen convinced believers.
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The Emptied Pockets: A Story Franklin Told on Himself
The most famous single episode of our friendship is the one that Franklin himself told, with characteristic honesty and characteristic humor, in his own writings. It is worth telling in full, because it illuminates both of us — and because it says something profound about the power of the Gospel that is more striking coming from a skeptic's mouth than it would be from mine.
The occasion was a sermon I was preaching in Philadelphia to raise funds for the Bethesda Orphanage in Georgia. Franklin had heard me preach before and had, by this time, developed something of an immunity to the emotional responses that less experienced listeners brought to my meetings. He was not going to be swept away. He came with his intellectual guard in place and, as he subsequently recounted, with a firm resolution already settled: he would not give a penny. He had doubts about the orphanage project — its logistics, its financing, its long-term viability — and he saw no reason to let his money be carried away by a preacher's eloquence when his judgment told him the cause was not a sound investment.
He stood with his pockets full — gold, silver, and copper — and listened. And as the sermon progressed, something happened to his resolution that he found, in retrospect, genuinely remarkable. Not a sudden conversion, not a blinding light, not a moment of theological conviction. But a gradual, involuntary, unstoppable softening of the position he had established before the first word was spoken. By the time I had been preaching for a few minutes, he told himself that perhaps he could spare a few copper coins. As the sermon continued and the need of the orphan children was described in terms that connected them to their specific human reality — hungry, cold, parentless, in a precarious colony far from any established support — he found himself thinking that some silver was not unreasonable. By the end of the sermon, he had made his decision: he would give everything he had with him. Gold, silver, copper — all of it went into the collection.
He told this story on himself in a tone that mixed admiration with rueful self-awareness. He was not pretending that the giving had been the product of spiritual conviction — he was honest that it was the product of persuasion, of the preaching's emotional and rhetorical force working on a mind that had intended to resist it. But he drew from the story a lesson about the power of genuine conviction in a speaker, about the difference between a man who believes what he is saying and a man who is merely saying it, about the way that authentic moral seriousness communicates itself across even the most skeptical intellectual defenses. He was a student of communication, and what he observed in my preaching was something he could not account for purely within the framework of rhetorical technique.
I will tell you what it actually was, since he could not. It was the Holy Spirit of God. Not my eloquence — I have never been deceived about the quality of my own eloquence, and while I labored diligently at the craft of preaching, I knew from decades of experience that craftsmanship alone does not empty the pockets of convinced skeptics. What empties the pockets of convinced skeptics is the same thing that reduced coal miners to tears and turned the comfortable church-goers of Boston inside out: the living Word of God, applied by the sovereign Spirit of God to the conscience and the will of a specific person in a specific moment, with a precision and a power that no amount of human preparation can produce and no amount of intellectual resistance can entirely prevent. Franklin's pockets were emptied not by my words but by the God whose message I was carrying. I was the instrument; He was the operative cause.
I have thought about that episode many times across the years. It gives me both encouragement and instruction. The encouragement: even the most firmly resolved skeptic is not beyond the reach of the Spirit, and the preacher who faithfully declares the truth of God can trust that God will do what God will do, regardless of the apparent impenetrability of the audience. The instruction: the sermon that moved Franklin was not a clever rhetorical performance. It was a direct, specific, concrete presentation of real human need and real spiritual remedy, delivered by a man who genuinely believed both. (1 Corinthians 2:4-5 KJV): "And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." The demonstration of the Spirit and of power. That is what moved Franklin's hand to his pocket on that Philadelphia afternoon. Not enticing words. Demonstration. The real thing, recognizable even by a man who had no theological framework for naming it.
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Thirty Years of Letters: What the Friendship Actually Looked Like
The friendship between Franklin and me was not merely the product of a single dramatic encounter. It was built, over more than thirty years, through the slow accumulation of shared work, mutual respect, personal correspondence, and the kind of genuine fondness that develops between two people who enjoy each other's company and find each other genuinely interesting.
Franklin printed my sermons. He printed my journals. He printed the accounts of the revival that circulated through the colonies and helped create the sense of a shared movement rather than a series of disconnected local events. He understood, with the instinct of a great communicator, that the reach of a message depends on more than the live event — that the printed word extends a speaker's voice beyond the crowd that was present and plants it in the minds of thousands who were not. He gave my ministry a reach it could not otherwise have had, and he did it with professionalism and without compromising his own intellectual independence.
I, in turn, helped Franklin in practical ways. The premises I had purchased in Philadelphia — land that I had intended for a meeting house, but which the circumstances of the revival's direction had not required — I offered to Franklin, and he used them as the foundation for the institution that would become the University of Pennsylvania. This is one of the more remarkable facts of our collaboration: a building purchased by an evangelical preacher for the propagation of the Gospel became, through the pragmatic genius of a Deist printer, one of the greatest centers of learning in the Western world. God's purposes, I have found, are not thwarted by the diversity of His instruments.
We wrote to each other across the years. Not with the frequency or the intimacy of my closest spiritual friendships — the letters to the Wesley’s or to the Countess or to the trusted ministers who knew my soul from the inside. But with the warmth and the frankness of two men who had established a genuine personal regard and who had no interest in pretending to a closeness they did not feel or a distance they did not want. Franklin was always frank about his religious position. I was always frank about mine. We did not pretend to agree where we disagreed, and the disagreement did not diminish the friendship.
I met Franklin's family. I knew something of his domestic life, his relationships, his practical concerns. He met some of my companions and correspondents. When I was in Philadelphia, we spent time together — not in formal theological debate, which would have been artificial and probably counterproductive, but in the kind of wide-ranging conversation that two intelligent, curious, passionate people fall into naturally when they find each other good company. He asked me questions about the revival, about theology, about why I believed what I believed and what the experience of genuine conversion was like from the inside. I asked him about his scientific experiments, his political observations, his views on the future of the colonies. We were genuinely interested in each other.
And I prayed for him. Constantly, specifically, with genuine urgency. Because whatever I enjoyed about his company, whatever I admired about his character, whatever pleasure I took in his friendship — none of it changed the fundamental reality that he was a soul for whom Christ had died and who had not yet received what Christ had died to give. The friendship did not soften my conviction about what he needed. It deepened the urgency with which I prayed for him to receive it. (Romans 9:3 KJV): "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." That was Paul's love for his unconverted Jewish kinsmen. I cannot claim that height of sacrificial love as my own experience, but I understand its direction. When you genuinely love a person, when you genuinely know what they lack and what the lacking costs, the prayer for their salvation becomes as natural and as urgent as the prayer for any other deep need. I prayed for Franklin for thirty years. And I leave the outcome, as I must leave all outcomes, in the hands of the God who is sovereign and who is good.
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What Friendship With an Unbeliever Teaches About Witness
I want to draw some lessons from the Franklin friendship that I believe are applicable to every Christian who has unconverted friends or family members — and who among us does not? Because one of the things I find most commonly mishandled in the area of Christian witness is the relationship between genuine friendship and the urgency of the Gospel. People tend to err in one direction or the other: either they keep the friendship warm by never raising the one subject that matters most, or they push the Gospel so hard and so relentlessly that the friendship becomes a delivery mechanism rather than a genuine human bond. Both errors damage the witness and wound the relationship.
The friendship with Franklin was neither of these things. I did not pretend, in his company, that his spiritual condition was a matter of indifference to me. He knew I was praying for him. He knew I believed he needed something he did not have. I made no secret of these convictions — how could I? They were the center of my entire ministry, and to pretend otherwise in his company would have been both dishonest and insulting to a man of his intelligence. He would have seen through the pretense immediately and valued me less for it.
But I also did not turn every conversation into an evangelistic encounter. I did not make every meeting an occasion for pressing the claims of Christ on his conscience, every letter a tract, every evening together a spiritual examination. I respected his freedom. I respected his intelligence. I respected the integrity of his own serious engagement with questions about God and human nature and the good life, even when I believed — as I always did — that his conclusions were wrong in ways that had eternal consequences. I treated him as a person capable of his own genuine searching, and I trusted that the God who was sovereign in salvation was also sovereign in the timing of His pursuit of any particular soul.
What I did was this: I was genuinely myself in his company. I did not leave my faith at the door when I walked into his house or sat down at his printing press. My convictions colored everything I said and everything I was, naturally and without performance, because they were genuinely mine and not a role I was playing. When the conversation turned to spiritual things — as it often did, because Franklin was genuinely curious and genuinely engaged with the deepest questions — I spoke honestly and fully from my own experience and my own conviction, without apology and without aggression. And when it turned to other things, I gave my full attention to those other things, because a man who is only interested in you as a potential convert is not genuinely interested in you at all, and both parties know it.
This is the model that I believe the Gospel itself commends. Jesus ate with sinners. He was accused of it. He did not eat with them because He was indifferent to their sin — He was deeply, specifically, personally concerned about it. He ate with them because genuine encounter requires genuine presence, and genuine presence requires genuine interest, and genuine interest means being interested in the whole person, not merely in the part of them that needs to be converted. (Luke 15:2 KJV): "And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them." This man receiveth sinners. He received them — welcomed them, spent time with them, engaged with them as people rather than as problems to be solved. The Pharisees were offended by it. The sinners were transformed by it. I tried, in my friendship with Franklin and with every other unconverted person I ever knew, to follow that same pattern of genuine, costly, attentive, prayerful receiving.
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The Honest Skeptic: What Whitefield Learned From Franklin
I said earlier that the friendship sharpened me, and I want to be specific about that. Because it would be easy to tell this story entirely from the perspective of what I brought to the friendship — the Gospel, the prayer, the evangelistic urgency — and to miss what Franklin brought to it that was genuinely valuable to me.
Franklin modeled something that I had always theoretically believed but did not always practically apply: the absolute necessity of intellectual honesty in dealing with people about the most important questions. He never told me what I wanted to hear. He never performed a religious interest he did not have. He never suggested that he was moving toward faith when he was not. This was, in a culture full of people who were churchgoing by habit and profession without genuine conviction, a rare and valuable quality. His honest skepticism was more useful to me, in terms of sharpening my understanding of what the Gospel actually needs to say to reach the educated and the unconvinced, than a dozen polite affirmations from people who had never seriously examined their own beliefs.
He asked me hard questions. Not with hostility — there was never any animus in Franklin's engagement with religious ideas. He was genuinely curious, genuinely seeking to understand, and his questions came from that place of honest inquiry. Why do you believe that God took on human flesh? What is the evidence for resurrection as a historical event? How do you account for the diversity of religious belief across different cultures and traditions? How can a good God permit the suffering that the world so obviously contains? These are not peripheral questions. They are the questions that every serious thinker asks, and any gospel proclamation that cannot engage with them honestly deserves to fail in its persuasion.
I engaged with them. Not always with complete answers — some of these questions do not admit of complete answers in this life, and intellectual honesty requires admitting that. But with the kind of substantive engagement that treats the questions as real, that does not deflect into piety when precision is what is needed, that does not substitute emotional appeals for rational ones when the questioner is asking for rational ones. I found that Franklin respected this. He disagreed with my conclusions, but he respected the engagement. And the respect was mutual — I found his pushback clarifying, forcing me to think through the foundations of what I believed with a rigor that comfortable agreement never demands.
He also modeled, for me, a quality of generosity toward human beings that I believe Christians are sometimes too quick to restrict to their own kind. Franklin's care for the poor — his practical, institutionalized, concrete investment in the welfare of ordinary people in Philadelphia — was genuine and effective. He did not care for the poor out of Christian motivation, as far as I could tell. He cared for them out of a deep and real regard for human beings as such, rooted in his conviction that human improvement and human flourishing were the most important work any person could undertake. I disagreed with the theological framework; I could not disagree with the outcome. And watching him gave me a sharper eye for the difference between Christian charity that flows from genuine love for persons and Christian charity that is primarily a vehicle for evangelism.
Both kinds have their place. But the friendship with Franklin helped me see, more clearly than I had before, that the person who serves others primarily as a means to a spiritual end is serving them less fully than the person who serves them because they genuinely matter — because they are image-bearers of God, whether they know it or not, and their well-being has an intrinsic value that exists independently of whether they can be converted. (Matthew 5:45 KJV): "For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." God's common grace extends to all without distinction. And the Christian who extends care and friendship and genuine interest only to those who are likely to be converted is imitating a narrower God than the one the Scriptures reveal. Franklin widened my vision of the people I was sent to love. For that, among many other things, I am grateful.
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The Question That Never Left: Why Franklin Never Came to Faith
I cannot write honestly about this friendship without addressing the question that hangs over it — the question that I have carried across the years and that I do not expect to have answered until I stand before the God who knows all things and understand what I could not understand here. Why did Benjamin Franklin never come to faith?
It was not for lack of preaching. He heard me preach more times than almost any person in the colonies, over a period of thirty years. He heard the new birth preached, the cross preached, repentance preached, justification preached, the urgency of response preached — not once or twice, in the diluted form that polite religious occasions might produce, but with the full force and the full weight that thirty years of Spirit-filled ministry can bring to bear. He was not ignorant of the Gospel. He was one of the most Gospel-informed skeptics I have ever met.
It was not for lack of friendship. He saw, in our relationship, something of what genuine Christianity looks like in the texture of a daily life — the warmth, the honesty, the practical generosity, the consistent concern for the welfare of others including himself. If Christianity is to be judged by its fruits in individual human character, he had a relatively close view of one person's attempt to live by it across three decades. Whatever my failures and inconsistencies — and there were many — I do not think the life I lived in his sight was entirely without witness.
It was not for lack of prayer. The prayers that rose for him from my knees across those thirty years were real and specific and urgent, offered to the God who has the power and the will to reach any soul in any condition, and who has promised to hear the prayers of His people. I do not doubt that those prayers were heard. What God did with them is His business, not mine.
What I conclude from the fact of his apparent persistence in unbelief is not that the Gospel failed, or that the friendship failed, or that the prayer failed. What I conclude is that salvation is God's sovereign work, carried out in His sovereign time, according to His sovereign purposes, and that human beings — even brilliant, good, genuinely seeking human beings — can resist the drawing of the Spirit for a very long time without that resistance being the final word. I do not know what passed between Franklin's soul and God in the quiet moments of his last years. I do not know what the final accounting looked like in the courts of heaven. I know only that God is merciful and that His mercies are beyond my calculation.
What I do know is this: the thirty years of prayer and friendship and preaching and correspondence were not wasted, whether or not they produced the visible fruit I hoped for in this life. The investment in a human soul is never wasted. The love poured into a relationship is never lost. The seed planted by the Word of God does not evaporate — it lies in the ground, and God tends what lies in the ground, and the harvest belongs to Him. (Galatians 6:9 KJV): "And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." In due season. Not necessarily in our season, not necessarily before we can see it, not necessarily in the form or at the time or by the means we expected. In due season. I held to that promise across thirty years of praying for Benjamin Franklin, and I hold to it for every unconverted person who is being loved and prayed for by a faithful Christian who has not yet seen the answer. Do not faint. In due season, the harvest comes.
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How to Reach the Skeptic: Lessons From a Lifetime
Let me gather the practical lessons of this chapter into a direct address to every reader who is trying to share the Gospel with someone who is genuinely skeptical — someone like Franklin, who is intelligent and honest and engaged and unconvinced, and who resists both condescension and manipulation with equal effectiveness.
First: know the person before you speak to the person. I knew Franklin — his background, his intellectual commitments, his genuine virtues and his genuine blind spots, the questions that actually troubled him and the questions that were merely rhetorical. This knowledge shaped how I engaged with him. The sermon that would move a convicted sinner in one direction might be entirely the wrong approach for a thoughtful Deist who has already examined and rejected the emotional appeals. Pay attention to the person. Listen before you speak. The Gospel does not require us to ignore who we are talking to in order to preach; it requires us to preach to who we are talking to.
Second: be honest about what you do not know. I told Franklin, when he asked hard questions, that I did not have complete answers to all of them. Not because I was uncertain about the Gospel's essentials — I was not, and I made that clear. But because intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the limits of one's own understanding, and because a person who claims to have a complete answer to every question is revealing either shallow thinking or dishonest presentation. The honest admission of uncertainty on secondary questions protects the credibility of the certainty on primary ones.
Third: let the friendship be a real friendship. Not a vehicle for the Gospel, but the thing itself — a genuine regard for the person, a genuine enjoyment of their company, a genuine interest in their whole life and not merely their spiritual condition. People know the difference between being loved and being targeted. The person who is genuinely loved is more open to what the person who loves them believes than the person who suspects they are being treated primarily as a evangelistic project.
Fourth: do not stop praying. Not as a substitute for engagement — prayer and engagement work together, and neither alone is sufficient. But as the essential undergirding of everything else. Because the work of genuine conviction and genuine conversion is God's work, and the person who prays is aligning themselves with the only power that can actually do it. Every conversation, every letter, every shared meal with an unconverted friend should be wrapped in prayer — before it, during it, after it. The same Spirit who emptied Franklin's pockets that afternoon in Philadelphia can reach any soul in any condition. Trust Him with the outcome. Do your part faithfully. And leave the harvest to the One who gives it.
Fifth, and finally: give them time. The Gospel is urgent — I have preached urgency all my life and I do not retract a word of it. But the urgency of the message does not require us to manufacture a crisis in the hearer that God has not yet created. Benjamin Franklin was reached by thirty years of patient, consistent, prayerful, genuine friendship far more than he could have been reached by thirty years of aggressive pressure. The seed takes time. The ground needs preparation. The harvest has its season. (Mark 4:26-28 KJV): "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself." He knoweth not how. The growth is mysterious and sovereign and not subject to the farmer's schedule. Cast the seed faithfully. Water it prayerfully. Trust the ground and the sky and the God who made them to do what only they can do. The harvest is coming. In due season, the harvest is always coming.
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Franklin and the Founding of a Nation: Whitefield's Broader Influence
To speak of the Franklin friendship is, inevitably, to speak of the broader world in which it existed — the world of colonial America on the verge of revolution, a world that both of us inhabited as active participants and that neither of us, I think, fully understood we were helping to shape. I want to say something about that larger story, because the friendship between a preacher and a printer was not merely a personal story. It was embedded in a historical moment of extraordinary consequence, and the two threads — the spiritual and the political — were more deeply intertwined than most historians have acknowledged.
Franklin and I occupied different positions in the colonial conversation about liberty, authority, and the rights of human beings. Franklin was moving, across the span of our friendship, from loyal British subject to revolutionary theorist to one of the principal architects of American independence. I remained, throughout my life, a subject of the British Crown, an ordained minister of the Church of England, a man whose political instincts were formed by a tradition of deference to lawful authority rather than resistance to it. We disagreed, toward the end of my life, about the direction the colonies were taking, and the disagreement was real.
But here is what I find remarkable in retrospect: the spiritual revolution that the Great Awakening had ignited in the colonies in the 1740s and the political revolution that Franklin and his colleagues were engineering in the 1770s drew from some of the same deep wells of conviction. The Awakening had told a million colonial Americans that every soul stands equal before God — that the coal miner and the plantation owner, the educated and the unlettered, the established and the marginal, all occupy the same ground at the foot of the cross and have the same claim on the mercy of the same Father. That conviction — the radical theological egalitarianism of the Gospel — did not stay inside the churches. It migrated, as ideas always migrate, into the political imagination of a generation, and when that generation was asked to articulate why they believed that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, the answer was rooted in something that the preachers of the Awakening had been saying for thirty years.
Franklin understood this connection better than almost anyone of his time, because he had been watching it from the printing press for three decades. He had printed the revival sermons. He had measured the crowds. He had observed, with his characteristically precise attention, what happened to a people when they were told repeatedly and persuasively that their souls were of infinite and equal worth in the sight of God. He had seen the effects on the political culture of the colonies — the new restlessness with hierarchical authority, the new language of individual liberty and conscience, the new conviction that the kind of deference that the old world expected was incompatible with the dignity that the Gospel proclaimed. The Revolution was not caused by the Awakening. But it was, in part, carried out by the children of the Awakening, and the vocabulary of liberty in which it was conducted was shaped, more than its secular champions generally acknowledged, by the theological convictions of the revival.
I did not live to see the Revolution completed. I died in September 1770, six years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. But I had watched, across three decades of American ministry, the spiritual conditions that made it possible developing under my feet, and Franklin had been my most perceptive companion in that watching. He knew what the revival had done to the colonial soul. He knew it better, in some ways, than I did, because he was observing it from outside the movement rather than inside it — with the clear-eyed perspective of a man who has no stake in the conclusion. (Proverbs 21:1 KJV): "The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will." The heart of a nation is also in the hand of the Lord. The Great Awakening was not a political project. But God, who works all things together according to the counsel of His own will, used the spiritual awakening of a generation to prepare the soil in which a new understanding of human dignity and human government could grow. I played my small part in that awakening. Franklin played his part in what followed. And the God who was sovereign over both of us was weaving something larger than either of us could have imagined from our respective positions inside it.
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On Evangelism and the Long View: What Thirty Years Teaches
I want to close this chapter on the Franklin friendship — and on the broader question of how to reach the skeptic and the unconvinced — by speaking from the perspective of the long view. Because one of the things that a thirty-year friendship with an unconverted man teaches is something that shorter engagements with the Gospel can easily miss: the absolute indispensability of patience.
We live in an age — and my own revival ministry was not entirely exempt from this — that tends to measure the success of evangelism by immediate visible response. Did they weep? Did they come forward? Did they make a decision? Are they in a church now? These are not bad questions. Immediate response is real and it matters, and the person who has been genuinely broken and genuinely converted in a field meeting has received something as real as anything that has ever happened to them. I do not minimize the immediacy of genuine conversion.
But I have also learned, across thirty-five years of ministry and dozens of long friendships with people who took a very long time to move toward God, that the Gospel's timeline is not always the preacher's timeline. The seed that falls on honest soil does not always germinate within the week. The person who hears the message and is genuinely troubled by it may carry that trouble for years before it resolves into repentance and faith. The friend who listens to your testimony and asks hard questions and goes home unconvinced may be, at the same time, far more affected than their intellectual resistance suggests. The work is often slower and quieter and less visible than the dramatic scenes of revival suggest, and the person who measures only by those dramatic scenes will badly misread what God is actually doing in the lives of the people around them.
I preached to ten million souls across thirty-five years. How many of them were genuinely converted? I do not know. I know the ones who came to me afterward, weeping or trembling or full of specific questions about what to do next. I know the ones who wrote to me in the years that followed, describing transformations that they dated to a specific sermon on a specific day. But I do not know the ones who carried a seed for years and were not converted until long after I had moved on. I do not know the ones whose children were converted, in part because of what had been planted in the parents at a revival meeting twenty years before. The full harvest of a ministry is not visible to the minister in his own lifetime, and the minister who needs to see the full harvest in order to persevere will give up too soon.
The Franklin friendship is the most vivid example from my own life of this principle. Thirty years of friendship, prayer, preaching, and correspondence — and no visible fruit that I was alive to see. A man of enormous intelligence and genuine goodwill, who knew the Gospel as well as most ministers and had seen its power demonstrated more clearly than most laypeople, who remained through all those years in the position of respectful engagement without personal commitment. Was it all wasted? I do not believe so for a single moment. The seed was planted. The soil was watered. The harvest — whatever form it ultimately took, in the privacy of an old man's reckoning with eternity, in quarters I was not present to witness — was in the hands of the God who gives the increase.
I commend to every Christian who is in a long, apparently fruitless relationship with an unconverted person the same posture I tried to maintain across thirty years of praying for Benjamin Franklin: hopeful patience, grounded in the character of God rather than in the visible progress of the work. He is the God who waited forty years for Israel in the wilderness. He is the God who kept pursuing Jacob through twenty years of self-reliance before breaking him at Peniel. He is the God who pursued the prodigal through the far country and was watching the road when he finally turned for home. He is not in a hurry. He is not discouraged by resistance. He does not abandon the work He has begun. (2 Peter 3:9 KJV): "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." Not willing that any should perish. That is the God in whose purposes our prayers for the unconverted are embedded. The prayers of thirty years are not lost. They are held in the hands of the One who is not willing that any should perish, who is working toward the repentance He desires, who will not abandon a soul that He has been pursuing simply because the pursuit has taken longer than we can see the point of. Trust Him. Pray on. Love well. And leave the harvest to the Lord of the harvest, who always — always — brings it in.
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Two Witnesses: David Garrick and Benjamin Franklin
It is worth pausing to note that the two most famous secular witnesses to the extraordinary quality of my preaching were, in their different ways, precisely the kinds of people the religious establishment of my era would have considered the least likely sources of credible testimony. Benjamin Franklin was the most famous religious skeptic in the colonies. David Garrick was the most famous actor in England.
Garrick was, in the world of the eighteenth-century stage, what Franklin was in the world of printing and politics — the unchallenged master of his craft, a man whose gifts were so extraordinary and whose influence so far-reaching that he had transformed the entire culture around him. He was the Shakespearean actor who had elevated the English stage from an entertainment for the rough to an art form for the cultured, who had brought a new naturalism and a new depth to performance that made his contemporaries look stiff and mechanical by comparison. He was also, like Franklin, a man of intelligence and genuine perception — not a shallow celebrity but a serious student of the art he practiced.
Garrick reportedly said — and the report was widely circulated and never denied — that he would give one hundred guineas to be able to say the word 'Oh' as I said it. This was not mere flattery. It was the professional judgment of the greatest vocal artist of his generation about a quality in my preaching that he recognized and could not duplicate: the quality of genuine emotion expressed in genuine language, with a precision and a power that no amount of technical training could produce in the absence of the real thing behind it.
What Garrick was identifying, I believe, was the same thing Franklin was identifying in his own way — the difference between performance and witness, between a man who is saying things and a man who is declaring what he has experienced. Garrick could produce any vocal quality on command. He had spent his career developing that technical mastery. What he could not produce — what none of his technique could generate — was the specific quality of a voice that was expressing something it genuinely believed and genuinely felt and genuinely knew. The 'Oh' that Garrick admired was not a vocal technique. It was the audible expression of a soul that had been to the cross and come back changed, that had seen what it meant for the Son of God to drink the cup of human sin, and that could not say the word 'Oh' in that context without the full weight of that knowledge pouring into it.
Two men — one a skeptic, one an actor, neither of them inclined to exaggerate the spiritual credentials of an evangelical preacher — both bore witness, from their respective positions of expert observation, to something in the preaching that could not be accounted for by technique or talent alone. I take their testimony seriously, not because it flatters me — the flattery is entirely to God, whose Spirit was doing what neither my talent nor my technique could do — but because it comes from exactly the kind of witnesses whose credibility cannot be questioned. They had no reason to exaggerate. They had every professional reason to be skeptical of claims they could not verify by their own standards. And they were moved. Not to conversion — at least not visibly, not in Garrick's case — but to acknowledgment. The acknowledgment that something was present in that voice that they could not explain and could not replicate.
I find it fitting that the most credible witnesses to what God was doing through the preaching were people who stood at a deliberate intellectual or professional distance from the movement — who came to observe rather than to participate, who had no stake in confirming what the revival was claiming for itself. Their testimony carries the weight that only disinterested witnesses can carry. They saw something they did not expect and could not account for, and they said so honestly. That honesty is itself a form of grace — the grace that God shows, even to those who have not yet acknowledged Him as its Source, in giving them honest eyes for what is real. (Psalm 19:1 KJV): "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." The heavens declare, whether or not the observer understands what is being declared. And a voice crying in the open air, filled with the Spirit of the living God, declares something even to those who do not yet have the theological vocabulary to name what they are hearing. Franklin named it as rhetorical power. Garrick named it as vocal mastery. Both were partially right. What they were hearing, and what neither of them fully named, was the voice of the Great Awakening — the voice of a sovereign God choosing to speak through one particular servant at one particular moment in history, and doing so with a clarity and a force that has not entirely faded more than two centuries after it fell silent.
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The University of Pennsylvania and the Gift of Collaboration
Before we leave the Franklin chapter, I want to say something about the broader collaboration that our friendship produced — beyond the personal, beyond the printing of my sermons, beyond the emptied pockets and the acoustic measurements. I want to speak about the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1749, I transferred to Franklin certain premises in Philadelphia that I had purchased some years earlier with the intention of establishing a meeting house. The circumstances of my ministry had not required those premises for that purpose, and they were sitting unused. Franklin had been working toward the establishment of a college in Philadelphia — an institution that would provide serious education for young men without the denominational restrictions that limited access to some of the existing colonial colleges. When he approached me about the property, I saw in the collaboration an opportunity to put otherwise idle resources to work in the service of something genuinely good.
The college that Franklin founded on those premises grew, in time, into the University of Pennsylvania — one of the great universities of the modern world, a center of medicine and law and science and the humanities that has contributed enormously to human knowledge and human welfare across nearly three centuries. I take no credit for that growth. Franklin built it; I merely contributed the land on which it was built. But I do take some satisfaction in the thought that premises purchased by a preacher who believed in the Gospel and the education of the whole person were consecrated, through the genius of a printer who believed in human reason and human improvement, to a purpose that has enriched millions of lives.
This is, I think, one of the more instructive aspects of the friendship — the way in which two men who disagreed profoundly about the ultimate ground and the ultimate goal of human flourishing could nevertheless collaborate practically toward ends that both valued. Franklin wanted education because he believed educated people were more effective agents of human improvement. I wanted education because I believed educated ministers were more effective heralds of the Gospel and because I believed the full development of every human mind was a legitimate expression of the dignity of every soul made in God's image. Our reasons were different. Our collaboration was real and its fruit was lasting.
I have also reflected on another dimension of this collaboration that moves me. The building that I purchased with the intention of spreading the Gospel became, under Franklin's hand, a place where the full breadth of human knowledge could be pursued. And there is something in that transformation that seems to me not a defeat but a fulfillment. Because all truth is God's truth. Every discovery made in a chemistry laboratory, every principle worked out in a legal library, every patient healed in a medical school — all of it, whether the discoverers acknowledge it or not, is an exploration of a universe made by the God who reveals Himself in both Scripture and creation. The University of Pennsylvania was not a church. But it was, and is, a house of human inquiry built on ground that a preacher dedicated to the glory of God. I find that fitting in a way that I cannot entirely explain but will not pretend not to feel.
I draw from this a principle that I believe has wide application: the Christian can sometimes accomplish more good by collaborating with a person of good will who holds different ultimate commitments than by insisting on the purity of his own enterprise. This is not a principle of theological compromise — I never compromised on the essentials of the Gospel, and I would not, and I do not recommend it. It is a principle of practical wisdom. The image of God in a human being, however suppressed or distorted, produces genuine goods — genuine creativity, genuine generosity, genuine care for others — that the Christian can acknowledge and work alongside without pretending to agree with the theological framework that the other person inhabits. (James 1:17 KJV): "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." Every good gift — including the gifts of intelligence and generosity and practical wisdom and love for human beings that I observed in Benjamin Franklin across thirty years — comes from the Father of lights, whether or not the recipient of those gifts acknowledges the Source. I acknowledged the Source. I thanked the Source. And I worked alongside the gifts where the working was good and the purpose was worthy. That is what genuine friendship with an unbeliever looks like at its best. And I am grateful — more grateful than I know how to express — that God gave me thirty years of it.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —