Relating to Benjamin Franklin:

"Down to the 1730's the churches and their ministers steadily lost influence....the minister...became but one among many expounders of ideas, attempting to persuade rather than simply reveal the truth to others. Furthermore, the old pattern of persuasion was not as effective as it had once been. Eighteenth-century audiences did not listen patiently to long sermons delivered in a plain style and setting forth accepted propositions based on recognized authorities" (120). "Students...were not isolated and they were in a position to address the whole population, which listened to them through new media of communications. Newspapers, for instance, were rapidly becoming the most important purveyors of information and molders of opinion in the colonies" (122). [They also] became a means of communicating instruction....Imperceptibly the newspaperman became the rival of the minister and the essay competed successfully with the sermon" (123).

"Toward the end of the 1730's there was a change....Benjamin Franklin noted it with interest. Franklin had seldom attended any public worship; the preachers' arid discourses seemed to him chiefly either polemic arguments or explications of the peculiar doctrines of one sect, with not a single moral principle inculcated" (124).