Free Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

that a simple and complacent deism had its own set of drawbacks. He had converted Collins and Ralph to deism, and they soon wronged him without moral compunction. Likewise, he came to worry that his own freethinking had caused him to be cavalier toward Deborah Read and others. In a classic maxim that typifies his pragmatic approach to religion, Franklin declared of deism, “I began to suspect that this doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful.”
    Although divine revelation “had no weight with me,” he decided that religious practices were beneficial because they encouraged good behavior and a moral society. So he began to embrace a morally fortified brand of deism that held God was best served by doing good works and helping other people.
    It was a philosophy that led him to renounce much of the doctrine of the Puritans and other Calvinists, who preached that salvation came through God’s grace alone and could not be earned by doing good deeds. That possibility, they believed, was lost when Adam rejected God’s covenant of good works and it was replaced by a covenant of grace in which the saved were part of an elect predetermined by God. To a budding rationalist and pragmatist like Franklin, the covenant of grace seemed “unintelligible” and, even worse, “not beneficial.” 15
A Plan for Moral Conduct
    After a year at Palmer’s, Franklin got a better-paying job at a far larger printing house, John Watts’s. There the pressmen drank pint after pint of watery beer throughout the day to keep them fortified. With his penchant for temperance and frugality, Franklin tried to convince his fellow workers that they could get their nourishment better by eating porringers of hot-water gruel with bread. Thus he became known as the “Water American,” admired for his strength, clear head, and ability to lend them money when they had used up their weekly pay at the alehouses.
    Despite his abstinence, the workers at Watts’s insisted that he pay a five-shilling initiation fee used for drinks. When he was promoted from the pressroom to the composition room, he was called on to pay yet another initiation, but this time he refused. As a result, he was treated as an outcast and subjected to small mischiefs. Finally, after three weeks, he relented and paid up, “convinced of the folly of being on ill terms” with his workmates. He promptly regained his popularity, earning the reputation of “a pretty good riggite,” someone whose jocularity and ability as a “verbal satirist” earned him respect.
    One of the least shy men imaginable, Franklin was as sociable in London as he had been in Boston and Philadelphia. He frequented the roundtables hosted by minor literary luminaries of the day, and he sought out introductions to various interesting people. Among his earliest surviving letters is one he sent to Sir Hans Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society. Franklin wrote that he had brought from America a purse made of asbestos, and he wondered if Sloane might want to buy it. Sloane paid a call on Franklin, brought the lad back to his Blooms-bury Square home to show off his collection, and bought the purse for a handsome sum. Franklin also made a deal to borrow books from a neighborhood bookseller.
    Ever since, as a young boy, he had invented some paddles and flippers to propel himself across Boston harbor, Franklin had been fascinated by swimming. He studied one of the first books on the subject, The Art of Swimming, written in 1696 by a Frenchman named Melchisedec Thevenot, which helped to popularize the breaststroke. (The crawl did not catch on for more than another century.) Franklin perfected variations on the motions for swimming both on the surface and underwater, “aiming at the graceful and easy as well as the useful.”
    Among the friends he taught to swim was a fellow young printer named Wygate. One day, during a boat trip on the Thames with Wygate and others, Franklin decided to show off. He stripped,