A good attitude

I've remarked in this space that religions could be improved by being willing to change when time begins to make their beliefs harder and harder to defend. In Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, he feels compelled to note what he calls "a singular instance in the history of mankind," a religious sect that is not sure it has everything right for all time.

This sect was called the Dunkards (or "Dunkers," as Franklin calls them). Franklin meets one the founders of the Dunkards, and describes a conversation they had.

"He complained to me that they were grievously calumniated by the zealots of other persuasions, and charged with abominable principles and practices to which they were utter strangers. I told him this had always been the case with new sects; and that to put a stop to such abuse, I imagined it might be well to publish the articles of their belief and the rules of their discipline. He said that it had been proposed among them, but not agreed to, for this reason; 'When we were first drawn together as a society, says he, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far, as to see that some doctrines which we once esteemed truths were errors, and that others which we had esteemed errors were real truths. From time to time, He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement; and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, and never to be parted from'" [Emphasis mine, of course.]

How very refreshing.