Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

life. Thus each individual is morally capable and therefore responsible for
his own actions. For Mayhew, the God that so endowed man was clearly a
being of divine goodness and love.
By the mid-l75Os, deism had swept through eastern Massachusetts, centering
around Boston, especially among the more civilized citizens. Skepticism
abounded toward the miracles of the Bible, and the work of the
English deist Thomas Morgan (The Moral Philosophers, 1737) circulated
throughout the area. Morgan had called for a return to the allegedly deist
teachings of the original Jesus, short of miracles and of messianism.
While most prevalent in the Boston area, deism was by no means nonexistent
in the other colonies. The transplanted Bostonian Benjamin Franklin
was a deist from his early years. Considering Franklin's overriding concern
with the opinion of others and with seizing the main chance, one is not
surprised that he carefully cloaked his deist views. Always hypocritically
willing to abandon principle for the sake of keeping his public image bland
and inoffensive, Franklin not only continued to attend a church in which he
did not believe but also pressured his daughter to do the same. For the
worried Franklin suspected that her failure to attend church would be used
to discredit him politically. In private letters, however, Franklin made clear
his deist belief in a natural rather than a revealed religion, in free will, in
an ethic of human happiness, and in a God of goodness.*
Philadelphia, in fact, was a center of deistic and skeptical opinion. Thus,
in the mid-l75Os, the Reverend William Smith, leader of the proprietary
party in Pennsylvania and head of the College of Philadelphia (later the
University of Pennsylvania), stressed the importance of a reasoned and
natural religion. And in New York, William Livingston called for more
rationality in religion, while Cadwallader Colden, one of the most eminent
men of the province, espoused in 1746 a deism closely akin to atheism in
its questioning of the concept of an immaterial First Cause. There was little
articulate deist leadership in the South in the first half of the century, but
widespread deism was found in Georgia in the late 1730s, and North Carolina
had always been pervasively indifferent to religious concerns.
Deist and rationalist thought did not, of course, spring up full-blown in
America. As we have indicated, the influence of English thinkers was dom-
*Frankl¡n's fawning posturing was a conscious rule of his life: "I made it a rule to
forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of
my own. I even forbade myself . . . the use of every word and expression . . . that
imparted a fixed opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc. and I adopted instead . . .
I conceive, I apprehend, or / imagine, or so it appears to me at present. When another
asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting
him sharply, ... in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances
that his opinion could be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed
to me some differences, etc. . . . [and as a result] for these fifty years past no one has
ever heard a dogmatic expression escape me, and ... I had early so much weight with
my fellow citizens . . . and so much influence in public councils . . ."
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