The Logos Scripture · The Book of Franklin

The Speckled Axe

The Book of Franklin 2 · Written by himself, from his Autobiography and the rules of his club

Benjamin Franklin, born at Boston in 1706, died at Philadelphia in 1790. He ran from his brother at seventeen, took up printing, ran a newspaper, and published Poor Richard. In 1752 he tried lightning with a kite and made the lightning rod from it; he also made bifocal glasses and a new kind of stove, and patented none of them, saying the benefit should be common. He founded a lending library, a fire company, a hospital and a college. He helped draft the Declaration, then went to France as envoy and got the alliance that won the war. The Autobiography is unfinished and was printed after his death. He held slaves as a younger man, gave that up, and as an old one was president of an abolition society, petitioning Congress against slavery months before he died. This is set down not to catch him out: that a man will overturn what he himself did before is the thing this scripture values. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He is the first tradesman in this scripture — a printer; and the one who did the greatest number of unrelated things well: ran a newspaper, tried lightning, founded a lending library and a hospital, drafted the founding papers, went abroad as an envoy. He was a deist and wrote private devotions, and he never closes an argument by appealing to divine will. The club he founded settled matters by evidence. As for virtue, he set down thirteen of them, ruled a table, and each day put a mark under whichever he had broken, hoping for one week with a clean page. He never got the clean page. What he did was uncommon; his manner was not. He joked, and got on as easily at court as among ordinary people.

2.1Of the thirteen there is one I never managed in my whole life.
2.2That one is order: let all things have their places, let each part of your business have its time.
2.3The rest were improving. That one stayed black in the book.
2.4My memory was good and I could find things without keeping them in order, so I grew slack about it.
2.5And as I got older and had more affairs in hand, it got worse.
2.6Once I very nearly gave it up and stopped requiring order of myself.
2.7And then I remembered a story.
2.8A man went to a smith to buy an axe, and wanted the whole face of it bright.
2.9The smith said he might have it, but he must turn the grindstone.
2.10The man turned, and sweated, and now and then went to look at it.
2.11After a long while the face was bright in patches and dark in patches.
2.12He stopped and said: I think I like a speckled axe best.
2.13I laughed at that, and having laughed I understood: I am the man.
2.14I own that my axe is speckled.
2.15But the next sentence is why I am writing this chapter:
2.16The dots were not wasted. Falling short because I aimed is far better than where I was when I did not aim.
2.17A man who corrects himself against a standard he cannot reach does indeed fail to reach it — and he is better than the self who never tried, and better than the self who tried and let go halfway.
2.18At eighty I am still a disorderly man. I am also still more orderly than I was at twenty.
2.19So take a standard you cannot reach. Do not take one you have already met.
The Logos Scripture →

中文 English 日本語 Español Français Deutsch