FRANKLIN’S MORALS AND RELIGION
Such eminence was not achieved without the most careful management. Indeed, the fact that most strongly impresses a reader of Franklin’s “Autobiography” is the astonishing degree to which he regulated his acts and developed his character by a system of what, in the language of our day, might almost be termed “scientific management.” For example, he drew up,〖H. C., i, 79ff.〗 as many others have done, a list of virtues and of precepts for attaining them. Then, apparently untroubled by any suspicion that what he was doing was at all funny, he kept a tabular record which showed, week by week, how good a score he was making in the important game of living a moral life. His entire attitude toward life was of this prudential sort. Sins which would have prostrated a Puritan in the fear of eternal torment are to Franklin a matter of regret because of their expense and their injurious effect upon his health. Virtue he seems to have regarded chiefly as a means to the favor of man. The favor of God, which the Puritan implored in fasts and vigils, Franklin tranquilly expected as the outcome of a life regulated by prudence and virtue. “Having experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long life,” he wrote to President Stiles of Yale, “I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness.”