12. The Leather Aprons and the Bible Moths
The Leather Aprons and the Bible Moths
“Men and melons are hard to know.”
This was one of the insights that appeared in Poor Richard’s Almanac, the booklet Ben Franklin published annually (or nearly so) beginning in December 1732. Like any almanac, it contained basic data on practical matters—such as times of tides and sunrises, schedules and locations of public courts, recipes, and weather forecasts—along with historical trivia and sayings of what you might call “folk wisdom.” What made Franklin’s Almanac popular (and extremely profitable) was the originality of his folk wisdom. He didn’t just gather hackneyed phrases and trot them out once again for public consideration—he made up new witticisms that were, in fact, witty. Many of them are still quoted today.
“Haste makes waste.”
“No gains without pains.”
“He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”1
So, while George Whitefield was beginning to study the wisdom of the ages at Oxford, Ben Franklin was crafting wisdom of his own in Philadelphia. Once again, Ben used a pseudonym. Was he buffering himself against the possibility that this publishing venture wouldn’t work? Possibly, but it’s even more likely that he understood the marketing value of humility, so he used a humble persona to lower expectations and surprise his readers.
Those are modern, strategic terms for something Ben seemed to understand intuitively. He was at the top of his game, publishing (and also editing and writing) the best newspaper in Philadelphia, after some very public gamesmanship. Now it might backfire to offer an almanac of his personal outlook on life—at the ripe age of twenty-six. Readers might see this as hubris. The public might resist being oversaturated with Franklin’s opinions. Remember: this was a Quaker-founded town. The spirit of Philadelphia was still communal rather than hierarchical. They would respond far better to the disarming wit of the bumpkin “Richard Saunders” than to the pronouncements of the powerful editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette.
And respond they did. Over the years, the Almanac became a runaway best seller, establishing Ben’s printing business and enabling him to branch out. It also gave future readers a huge supply of maxims from Franklin’s fertile mind.
Taken together, the Poor Richard sayings presented a simple world-view. Future success comes from present restraint. Ben learned many of these lessons the hard way—setthng in with “dogs” like James Ralph and Hugh Meredith and emerging with the “fleas” of near disaster; failing to thump the “melon” that was Governor William Keith. We find a Solomonic progression in these sayings: A results in B, so avoid A. Lessons are drawn from nature—melons, fleas, and so on—so look for the true nature of things and act accordingly. Limit your foolish passions and save resources for the future.
“God helps them that help themselves,” he also wrote, and this could sum up his religious thinking, at least at that point in his life.2 He had gleaned enough from his Puritan upbringing to embrace the value of work, and he retained a basic belief in God. His scientific mind recognized the mechanical patterns of not only nature but also morality (A results in B). His own failings had taught him some humility, and so he knew that God was helping, and he was grateful. But this divine grace was granted to those who were disciplined enough to “help themselves.” We launch the boat; God sends the wind.
In his autobiography, Franklin took some time out to discuss his religious development. He mentioned that, in his youth, he became “a thorough deist” after reading a book against deism and finding its arguments weak. (In short, deism has a mechanistic universe and an inactive creator, and thus a merely pragmatic morality. Do whatever works.) Later, after seeing the pain caused by such amoral “freethinking”—by Governor Keith, James Ralph, and himself (leaving Deborah to go to England)—he “began to suspect that this doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful.”3
So this inventor cobbled together his own faith from scraps of Cotton Mather and top deists of the day: “I grew convinced that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man, were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life, and I formed written resolutions . . . to practice them ever while I lived.” He rejected the revelation of God in the Bible, but began to think “that though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden . . . yet probably those actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us.”4
Young Ben determined that there was a basic morality that just made sense, and as he entered adult life in Philadelphia, this belief gave him a “tolerable character to begin the world with.”5
The Junto
Once again, Ben began blazing his own trail. Later in life he would become a successful inventor; now he was inventing a philosophy of life. He borrowed from other thinkers of the day, but he didn’t wear anyone else’s label. He wasn’t exactly a deist, and he certainly wasn’t a Puritan. Ben Franklin was his own man, going his own way. It was hard for anyone to keep up with him.
And here we find a major paradox in Ben’s personality: it’s lonely being the smartest guy in the room. His intelligence set him apart, and so did his keen sense of responsibility. As we’ve seen, he had been hurt several times by trusted friends who turned out to be irresponsible. You might think this would make him withdraw from others entirely, but he didn’t. An inherently social being, Ben kept gathering groups of people around him. As biographer Edmund S. Morgan put it, “If it is true that he always held something of himself in reserve, it is also true that he could not get along without company.”6
In 1727, he started one such group in Philadelphia. First known as the Leather Apron Club and later as the Junto, it included three coworkers from Keimer’s print shop and a few other tradesmen Ben met around town. They convened every Friday night, first at local taverns and later in rented rooms, to discuss philosophy, business, and politics. While these gatherings teemed with laughter, friendship, and good ale, Franklin also organized them thoroughly. On a regular rotation, members were required to bring questions for discussion. They agreed to support one another in life and business.
This idea did not originate with Ben Franklin. In fact, he might have gotten it from his old friend Cotton Mather, who was probably adapting an idea that John Calvin had used in France in the 1500s. Mather wrote a book called Religious Societies: Proposals for the Revival of Dying Religion, by Well Ordered Societies. This was published in 1724, the same year young Ben visited Mather and bumped his head. As they met in Mather’s library, did the old Puritan and the young printer discuss these “well ordered societies”?
Of course, religious “small groups” had been part of the Christian experience since the New Testament believers met “from house to house” in Jerusalem (Acts 2:46 KJV). It was part of the monastic movement in medieval times and revived by various groups (including Calvinists) during the Reformation. There is evidence of religious societies forming in the early 1700s in London and New England, specifically attempting to combat the “disorders” in the church and society—the growing immorality and corruption.
Mather’s contribution to the idea lay in the breadth of its scope. For him, religious societies were not just extra church meetings or even splinter groups disaffected by the direction of the main church, but collections of people of diverse classes with different ideas exploring together how to apply their faith to everyday life. “Cotton Mather, in the organization of reforming and religious societies, brought the Church into the world,” wrote one scholar.7
Franklin had problems with the Puritan faith that gripped Boston during his youth, but he never entirely repudiated it. Instead, we see him visiting Mather on that quick trip back home. We see him creating a kind of Puritan-deist hybrid as his personal way of life. And here we see him adapting Mather’s idea for religious societies that discuss worldly matters (among other things) into a secular society that discusses religious ideas (among other things).
Mather had suggested ten specific questions that might be asked in religious societies on a regular schedule. Consider question 6: “Can any further methods be devised, that ignorance and wickedness may be chased from our people in general, and that household piety in particular may flourish amongst them?”
Or question 8: “Is there any matter to be humbly moved unto the legislative power, to be enacted into a law for public benefit?”
Or question 9: “Do we know of any person under sad and sore affliction, and is there anything we may do for the succor of such an afflicted neighbor?”8
So when Ben Franklin started the Junto, he came up with a similar list of questions. Of course this group wasn’t so interested in “household piety,” but it was still focused on social improvement and mutual “succor.” Ben asked for reports on their reading “particularly in history, morality, poetry, physics, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge.”9 Junto members were expected to share stories of fellow citizens who succeeded or failed in business.
Franklin’s question 6 asked, “Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? Or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?”10 This wasn’t mere gossip; it was a learning exercise. This group was studying human behavior and discussing what worked and what didn’t.
Where Mather had sought to expose the dangers of “ignorance and wickedness” in the interest of greater “piety,” Franklin asked, “What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? of imprudence? of passion? or of any other vice or folly?” (question 7). Both sets of questions invited discussion on public policy. Similar to Mather’s eighth question, Franklin’s fourteenth asked, “Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country, of which it would be proper to move the legislature an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting?”11
In both groups, members were invited to mention their own sickness or that of neighbors. Always a pragmatist, Franklin pointedly asked, “What remedies were used, and what were their effects?” (question 9).12
Through twenty-four questions, Franklin’s Junto associates were considering ways they could offer practical help to one another and to their community. Despite the similarities with Mather’s groups, the Junto’s goal was not Christian fellowship, but .
We see here the difference between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, between old Boston and new Philadelphia. Despite his attempts to bring the church into the world, Mather was coming from a place where the church ruled society. It had been that way in Boston from the start and was only now changing. It could be assumed there that the solutions to society’s disorders were religious in nature. Ignorance and wickedness were the problem; piety was the answer.
In religiously diverse Philadelphia, Franklin made no such assumption. His group had all the trappings of Mather’s “religious society” but without the religion. While some of its members were religious, the group did not seek religious answers to social issues. Instead, they sought to improve themselves and society through hard work, good thinking, and mutual support.
Meanwhile, at Oxford University, a similar group was forming.
The Holy Club
John and Charles Wesley were sons of a Puritan minister in Epworth, Lincolnshire. John received an MA from Oxford University in 1727, assisted his father in parish ministry for two years, and then returned to teach at Oxford in 1729. Four years younger, Charles also studied at Oxford. Sometime during John’s two years away from the school, Charles began meeting with other students for prayer, Bible study, and accountability. When John returned to Oxford, he joined the group, bringing his strong leadership skills.
At what point did this evolve from a casual get-together to an organized meeting? Even the Wesley brothers disagreed on that. But, starting with four or five members and adding a few more along the way, the group continued to meet about once a week. Besides prayer and Bible study (poring over the Greek New Testament), they also celebrated Communion and occasionally visited the sick or imprisoned. Other Oxford students derisively tagged them as the Holy Club, Sacramentarians, Methodists, or Bible Moths. (Presumably they fluttered around the Bible as moths around a flame, or they chewed on it as moths chewed cloth.) The name that stuck was “Methodist,” a reference to their method of practicing the Christian faith.
Of course this small-group impulse did not arise in a vacuum. Like Cotton Mather, the Wesleys were continuing an ancient Christian tradition. They were possibly influenced by Mather’s 1724 book, but it’s even more likely that they learned from the Pietist movement that developed in Germany in the late 1600s. Pietist leader Philipp Jakob Spener had launched “piety groups” (collegia pietatis) within German Lutheran churches, in which serious Christians would pray, study, and encourage one another in spiritual growth. Professor August Francke, a Spener protégé, carried the Pietist movement into the universities at Leipzig and Halle in much the same way as the Wesleys were attempting at Oxford. The Wesleys might also have heard about a new community of Moravian Brethren forming in the 1720s at the German estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, focusing on prayer, Scripture, and missionary outreach. (The Moravians would become very important to both John and Charles in later years.)
As an avid reader, John Wesley was challenged by works such as Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650), the fifteenth-century Of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, and two new books by William Law: Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729). All of these works urged a more disciplined approach to Christian faith, something the Wesleys wanted to share with their “Holy Club” at Oxford.
And just like Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, the Wesleys created questions for the Oxford Methodists to consider, individually and together. Self-examination was crucial to personal development in holiness, so Wesley composed a “scheme” of six or seven different questions for each day of the week, including:
• “Have I duly meditated?”
• “Have I been zealous to do, and active in doing, good?”
• “Have I thought or spoke unkindly?”
• “Has goodwill been . . . the spring of all my actions toward others?”
Similar questions were part of the group meetings:
• “What known sins have you committed since our last meeting?”
• “What temptations have you met with?”
• “What have you thought, said, or done, of which you doubt whether it be sin or not?”13
While both Mather and Franklin asked about society and the group itself, the Wesleys’ questions focused on the self, one’s personal attitudes and actions. This doesn’t mean that the Holy Club was entirely self-centered. On the contrary: its members were actively involved in helping the poor, visiting the sick, and going to prisons, yet they saw outward ministry springing from inward purity. The ultimate goal was not the improvement of society, but the improvement of the individual soul.
Joining the Club
Even before he entered Oxford University in 1732, George Whitefield had heard about the Holy Club. Once at the school, he often heard students mocking the Wesleys and their small group of devoted believers, and he would speak up in defense of these “Methodists.” Yet he waited a year before connecting with them. He and Charles Wesley had seen each other in passing, but they hadn’t met. (Remember the poem Charles wrote about seeing the “thoughtful” Whitefield as he “roved” about campus.)
We can’t be sure why George waited so long, since he didn’t elaborate on the point in his memoirs. We might imagine that he was nervous about joining up with such a disparaged group, since he already saw himself as an “odd fellow.”
Here the young Whitefield displays a characteristic that he shared with the young Franklin: they were loners who needed people. The two men expressed this in different ways, certainly, but the contradiction can be seen in both of them. George had been playing out a personal drama in his soul, alternately striving to be the best and worst person possible. This had to be a lonely struggle, even though his good or bad actions often played out in public. He often connected with people by performing for them, whether in plays at school, practicing sermons at the inn, or running errands for his wealthy classmates. That satisfied some of his social needs, but it also kept an aesthetic distance around him.
At this point he was on his way to the goal of becoming an Anglican minister, like his great-grandfather, but he was also headed in a new direction. He was seeking spiritual discipline in his life, answering the call to be truly devout and holy. Was this a goal he could share with others, or would it be better for him to continue navigating his own path?
In his memoirs, George made his first meeting with Charles Wesley sound like a spy tryst. He sent a woman—an apple seller on campus—to Charles with news of someone in need. Though George wanted to remain anonymous, she revealed that he had sent her. Charles sent a message back with her, inviting George to breakfast the next morning.
“It was one of the most profitable visits I ever made in my life,” George wrote about that breakfast. “My soul, at that time, was athirst for some spiritual friends to lift up my hands when they hung down, and to strengthen my feeble knees.” Charles sensed this spiritual hunger in his newfound friend and lent George some books on spiritual matters. Those books changed George’s life.14
The first was Nicodemus, or A Treatise Against the Fear of Man, by August Francke, a leader in the German Pietist movement. “I do not offer this as a piece of great learning, or a thing extraordinary,” wrote the professor in the opening pages of this 1701 work. “The plain truth of my God, set out in its natural lustre, and the least communication of his divine power lively affecting the heart, is infinitely more valuable to me, than all the polite arts and learning of this world. And my only boasting in the Lord is this, that I have betaken myself to that school, and, without any merit or worthiness of my own, have been received into it, wherein the highest wisdom is, ‘to know Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’ ”15
This simple introduction served as a battle cry, one that rallied the impressionable Whitefield. There was a conflict in the Anglican church (as there had been in the German Lutheran church) between education and experience. Even in institutions with strong Christian heritage, like Oxford, the Bible was being openly doubted and dismissed. Professors were teaching natural philosophy rather than divine revelation, and preachers were being trained to deliver the same erudition to their congregations. When a group like the Holy Club sought to live by truly Christian principles, getting back to basics, and actually adopting a method of life prescribed by the university (but long neglected), its members encountered derision from their fellow students.
Francke’s book spelled out the issues. The “plain truth” of God was enough, “affecting the heart.” That personal experience of knowing Christ was worth far more than “polite arts and learning.” Those who embraced this experience needed to get over their “fear of man,” unlike the biblical Nicodemus, a secret disciple of Jesus. True believers needed to withstand mockery and expect mistreatment.
We can trace these themes through Whitefield’s career. Despite his Oxford degree, he was never much of a scholar. He delivered a plain gospel, inviting his hearers to experience Christ. And he received strong opposition from religious leaders, many of whom thought he was dumbing down religion. Eventually he learned to expect this opposition and wear it with pride.
But for a young man of eighteen or nineteen, still figuring out who he was, this was an important challenge. Francke (like Charles Wesley) was throwing down a gauntlet. Would the people-pleasing Whitefield pick it up?
The second book George got from Charles was an anonymous 1680 work called The Country-Parson’s Advice to His Parishioners, which put forth some basic evangelical theology and practical ideas for living righteously.
It’s easy to see why the Wesleys would recommend this book to their Holy Club comrades. After challenging readers to commit to holy living, the Country Parson urged them to connect with other like-minded souls. “Thou wilt do well to seek out some good men that have taken up the same resolution and to acquaint thyself with them, and if possible . . . to make them . . . bosom-friends. Let them know thy design, and purpose of living holily, and Christianly. . . . Desire their prayers, their instruction, their reproofs, their encouragements.”16
This was the game plan of the Oxford Methodists: mutual prayer, study, accountability, and exhortation. “I confess it will be no easy matter for thee to find such persons; the number of them is but small,” wrote the Parson—and yet here was a group numbering maybe fifteen at the time Whitefield came along. The book also presented a future vision that proved downright prophetic:
And let me tell thee by the way, that if these good men of the Church, will thus shew themselves, and unite together in the several parts of the Kingdom, disposing themselves into fraternities, or friendly societies, and engaging each other . . . to be helpful and serviceable to one another in all good Christian ways, it would be the most effectual means for restoring our decaying Christianity to its primitive life and vigour, and the supporting of our tottering, and sinking Church. . . . Be all as one man (thus it was with the primitive Christians, Acts 2) and so march forward in the good ways of God against all opposition.17
As they breakfasted together that Oxford morning, did Charles and George have any inkling of the immense role they and their tiny network of believers would play in restoring vigor to a decaying church?