Benjamin Franklin's Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God

Benjamin Franklin achieved his intellectual and literary proficiency in the Eighteenth Century during the Age of Reason, with the multitude of philosophical advances that reflected heavily on the content and style of his work. He was no stranger to the works of John Locke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, and his writing echoed those found also in the literature of the period. Long past the early colonial days of Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, the Christian idea of predestination was now called into question, with a novel attitude toward the Creator that developed to coincide with the respective philosophical concepts. Benjamin Franklin, however, took his Enlightenment ideas further than his fellow scholarly contemporaries. While the philosophers of his era remained in arguing among themselves about the nature of mankind, Franklin believed in bringing his moral and scientific ideas to the common people. His wit, coupled with his intellect, had an immediate appeal to his readership. In the introductory lines of the Autobiography, which he began writing in 1771, he addresses his son William, the Royal Governor of New Jersey, with the intention of …show more content…
In Part One, before the American Revolution, his rhetoric is narrow and speaks only to his son, but as readers progress into the following sections, his style of writing changes. Yet in Part Two in the Continuation of the Account of my Life, Begun at Passy 1784, Having written it 13 years later, his authorial presence displays a personality that is purpose-driven. Instead of amusing his son, and himself with an account of youthful trials and imperfections, Franklin was writing to instruct the public of his present-day. His tone is, therefore, perceptibly more self-reflective and moralistic than it had been