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appreciation of books was one of the traits shared by the Puritanism of Mather and the Enlightenment of Locke, worlds that would combine in the character of Benjamin Franklin. 32
    Less than a mile from Mather’s library was the small bookshelf of Josiah Franklin. Though certainly modest, it was still notable that an uneducated chandler would have one at all. Fifty years later, Franklin could still recall its titles: Plutarch’s Lives (“which I read abundantly”), Daniel Defoe’s An Essay upon Projects, Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good, and an assortment of “books in polemic divinity.”
    Once he began working in his brother’s print shop, Franklin was able to sneak books from the apprentices who worked for booksellers, as long as he returned the volumes clean. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.”
    Franklin’s favorite books were about voyages, spiritual as well as terrestrial, and the most notable of these was about both: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the saga of the tenacious quest by a man named Christian to reach the Celestial City, which was published in 1678 and quickly became popular among Puritans and other dissenters. As important as its religious message, at least for Franklin, was the refreshingly clean and sparse prose style it offered in an age when writing had become clotted by the richness of the Restoration. “Honest John was the first that I know of,” Franklin correctly noted, “who mixed narration and dialogue, a method of writing very engaging to the reader.”
    A central theme of Bunyan’s book—and of the passage from Puritanism to Enlightenment, and of Franklin’s life—was contained in its title: progress, the concept that individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based on a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity. Christian’s famous opening phrase sets the tone: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world…” Even for the faithful, this progress was not solely the handiwork of the Lord but also the result of a human struggle, by individuals and communities, to triumph over obstacles.
    Likewise, another Franklin favorite—and one must pause to marvel at a 12-year-old with such tastes in leisure pursuits—was Plutarch’s Lives, which is also based on the premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better. Plutarch’s heroes, like Bunyan’s Christian, are honorable men who believe that their personal strivings are intertwined with the progress of humanity. History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.
    This outlook clashed with some of the tenets of Calvinism, such as the essential depravity of man and the predestination of his soul, which Franklin would eventually abandon as he edged his way closer to the less daunting deism that became the creed of choice during the Enlightenment. Yet, there were many aspects of Puritanism that made a lasting impression, most notably the practical, sociable, community-oriented aspects of that religion.
    These were expressed eloquently in a work that Franklin often cited as a key influence: Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good, one of the few gentle tracts of the more than four hundred written by Cotton Mather. “If I have been,” Franklin wrote to Cotton Mather’s son almost seventy years later, “a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book.” Franklin’s first pen name, Silence Dogood, paid homage both to the book and to a famous sermon by Mather, “Silentiarius: The Silent Sufferer.”
    Mather’s tract called on members of the community to form voluntary associations to benefit society, and he personally founded a neighborhood improvement group, known as Associated Families, which Benjamin’s father