Franklin on the Hemphill Trial

B ) ENJAMIN FRANKLIN in his Autobiography alludes but briefly to a dispute among the Presbyterians of Philadelphia in I735, in which he seems actually to have been rather deeply involved. A Reverend Samuel Hemphill had been brought over from Ireland in I734, to assist the only regular Presbyterian minister in the city, but was soon discovered to be preaching what his superiors considered heterodox doctrines. He was arraigned on several specific articles, tried by a commission of the Synod, and dismissed from the ministry. The trial of this new minister interested Franklin so much that he came to Hemphill's defense in the controversy which ensued. But in writing of the affair in the Autobiography, Franklin dismissed it in two short paragraphs, stating that little or none of the documentary evidence concerning the trial existed at the time he wrote and implying that the matter was of no great importance. Biographers and critics of Franklin, following this lead, have apparently considered the evidence insufficient to disclose the major issues of the trial, or have felt that the dispute was not worth investigation. Neither of these assumptions is quite correct. The pamphlets and the records involved in the case clarify considerably Franklin's rather surprising antipathy for the Presbyterian clergy and indicate the nature and depth of his religious convictions at the time. Franklin tells us in the Autobiography' that he preferred the sermons of Hemphill-although they were discovered after the trial to be not his own-to those of the older clergy, and for that reason Franklin did what he could, around the time of the trial and after, to raise a party in Hemp

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