At his church in Northampton, Massachusetts, Edwards struggled to bring the town’s young people to a “new birth” in Christ. He wanted them to undergo a conversion experience rather than spend their evenings in “frolics,” partying and drinking.

As for the second big movement, the Great Awakening, the man who set it going at first acted much like a student of nature, too. In 1723, the year Franklin ran away, twenty-year-old Jonathan Edwards sent an essay to the Royal Society, a scientific organization in England. In it, Edwards recorded his observations on the way spiders spun out lines of web and went “sailing in the air . . . from one tree to another.” (In fact, they used their webs the same way Franklin used his kite to be pulled across the pond.) In college Edwards read the writings of John Locke and Isaac Newton. But instead of a career in science, he became a minister. Unlike Franklin, he was “by nature very unfit for secular business.”

In England the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke had written about how governments came to exist. Kings and queens claimed that their authority came from God. Locke doubted that. Why did kings have any “divine right” to rule? He suggested that the first human governments had been formed centuries ago, when people in a state of nature joined together to protect themselves. If kings ruled, it was not because God blessed them with power but because people had created that form of government.

I love company, chat, a laugh, a glass, and even a song

So he launched a kite, jumped into a nearby pond, and begged his friend to take his clothes to the other side—where he picked them up, having proved that the wind was strong enough to blow him and the kite across the pond. Years later Franklin became famous by flying a kite during a thunderstorm to prove that lightning was a form of electricity. He designed a stove that heated houses better than open fireplaces and bifocal glasses to help the nearsighted. He liked to encourage “experiments that let light into the nature of things.” Franklin’s attitude is what counts here: he was intensely interested in this world, not the next. He was secular, we should say—a word that comes from the Latin saecularis, meaning of the world.

So he launched a kite, jumped into a nearby pond, and begged his friend to take his clothes to the other side—where he picked them up, having proved that the wind was strong enough to blow him and the kite across the pond.

But their God was not the sort who divided the Red Sea to help Moses escape the Egyptians or the God who sent his son Jesus to earth to walk on water and be raised from the dead. God governed the world through natural laws, deists argued. Call him the “Supreme Architect” or “Nature’s God”—he had no need for miracles. Deists believed that human reason was the key to uncovering nature’s laws. The famous British scientist Isaac Newton had made huge advances in human knowledge, using mathematics to plot the path of the planets through the heavens and discovering the force of gravity. Like the deists, young Franklin adopted the methods of Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher who was forever asking questions.

famous British scientist Isaac Newton had made huge advances in human knowledge, using mathematics to plot the path of the planets through the heavens and discovering the force of gravity.

Deists believed that human reason was the key to uncovering nature’s laws

As Benjamin worked in his brother’s shop, he borrowed books by philosophers

A print shop is the sort of place where all manner of ideas turn up

Servants and slaves often ran away. In doing so they showed themselves to be doubters, at least about inequality.

Enlightenment

These thinkers believed in God—many called themselves “deists.”

But the boy didn’t take to church.

Benjamin Franklin.

One, the Great Awakening, was a religious movement that was all about finding certainty and faith; the other, the Enlightenment, was its opposite, concerned with questioning and doubt.