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Essay on Benjamin Franklin as a Puritan
Benjamin Franklin, as his country's first and archetypical public philosopher, was the most important figure in the eighteenth-century secularization of the American Dream. The Puritans of seventeenth-century New England saw their settlement as a City on a Hill, destined by God to serve as example to the nations of the pure and correct worship of God both in church and in society. A number of thinkers in the next century took this dream of moral regeneration in a virgin land and brought it down to earth: they substituted for the vision of the heavenly inheritance that of the secular celestial city.
Benjamin Franklin proposed something quite modest: a prudential and productive ethic for a mass middle-class society, which is essentially what America, has always been. He was concerned not with the final ends of man but with proximate social goals. Nations are not spiritual entities, and the state is more properly involved in the things of Caesar than of Jesus or Socrates. Franklin retains the Puritan concern for self-improvement but removes its otherworldly orientation. Franklin was continually balancing between the puritan values of his upbringing and the modern American world to which his career served as prologue.
His strict Puritan religion stayed with him throughout his entire life, and it gave Franklin great discipline, which is probably an ideal that helped Franklin reach the success he did. Franklin was also constantly critiquing himself looking to see if he was truly a person of high morale......
