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"Ben Franklin"
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography: Page 5
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his church history of that country, entitled Magnalia Christi Americana, as 'a
godly, learned Englishman," if I remember the words rightly. I have heard that
he wrote sundry small occasional pieces, but only one of them was printed, which
I saw now many years since. It was written in 1675, in the home-spun verse of
that time and people, and addressed to those then concerned in the government
there. It was in favor of liberty of conscience, and in behalf of the Baptists,
Quakers, and other sectaries that had been under persecution, ascribing the
Indian wars, and other distresses that had befallen the country, to that
persecution, as so many judgments of God to punish so heinous an offense, and
exhorting a repeal of those uncharitable laws. The whole appeared to me as
written with a good deal of decent plainness and manly freedom. The six
concluding lines I remember, though I have forgotten the two first of the
stanza; but the purport of them was, that his censures proceeded from good-will,
and, therefore, he would be known to be the author.
"Because to be a libeller (says he)
I hate it with my heart;
From Sherburne town, where now I dwell
My name I do put here;
Without offense your real friend,
It is Peter Folgier."
My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the
grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the
tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church. My early readiness in learning
to read (which must have been very early, as I do not remember when I could not
read), and the opinion of all his friends, that I should certainly make a good
scholar, encouraged him in this purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin, too, approved
of it, and proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of sermons, I suppose
as a stock to set up with, if I would learn his character. I continued, however,
at the grammar-school not quite one year, though in that time I had risen
gradually from the middle of the class of that year to be the head of it, and
farther was removed into the next class above it, in order to go with that into
the third at the end of the year. But my father, in the meantime, from a view of
the expense of a college education, which having so large a family he could not
well afford, and the mean living many so educated were afterwards able to
obtain--reasons that be gave to his friends in my hearing--altered his first
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