“A Difference in Opinion is Inevitable”: Franklin, Hemphill, and Modern Toleration

This paper examines Benjamin Franklin’s defense of Samuel Hemphill, an Irish Presbyterian minister who was expelled by the Philadelphia Synod in 1735. The Hemphill affair is important because it sits on the cusp of new forms of religious life and new practices of tolerance and intolerance. Though small and local, and fought with familiar weapons, it illuminates something new: a world in which one of the primary sites of toleration is defined by the ways in which a religious community produces and maintains orthodoxy.