the pavilions, boarding-houses, and dormitories are done. Nothing is
now wanting but the central building for a library and other general
purposes. For this we have no funds, and the last legislature refused
all aid. We have better hopes of the next. But all is uncertain. I have
heard with regret of disturbances on the part of the students in your
seminary. The article of discipline is the most difficult in American
education. Premature ideas of independence, too little repressed by
parents, beget a spirit of insubordination, which is the great obstacle
to science with us, and a principal cause of its decay since the
Revolution. I look to it with dismay in our institution, as a breaker
ahead, which I am far from being confident we shall be able to weather.
The advance of age, and tardy pace of the public patronage, may probably
spare me the pain of witnessing consequences.
I salute you with constant friendship and respect.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLXVIII.--TO JAMES SMITH, December 8, 1822
TO JAMES SMITH.
Monticello, December 8, 1822.
Sir,
I have to thank you for your pamphlets on the subject of Unitarianism,
and to express my gratification with your efforts for the revival of
primitive Christianity in your quarter. No historical fact is better
established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded,
was that of the early ages of Christianity; and was amoung the
efficacious doctrines which gave it triumph over the polytheism of the
ancients, sickened with the absurdities of their own theology. Nor was
the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the
force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the
will of the fanatic Athanasius. The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like
another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and
growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs. And a strong
proof of the solidity of the primitive faith, is its restoration,
as soon as a nation arises which vindicates to itself the freedom of
religious opinion, and its external divorce from the civil authority.
The pure and simple unity of the Creator of the universe, is now all
but ascendant in the eastern States; it is dawning in the west, and
advancing towards the south; and I confidently expect that the present
generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the
United States. The eastern presses are giving us many excellent pieces
on the subject, and Priestley’s learned writings on it are, or should
be, in every hand. In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three,
and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no
candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what
presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He
proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining
guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without
rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullability,
which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the
mind becomes a wreck.
I write with freedom, because, while I claim a right to believe in
one God, if so my reason tells me, I yield as freely to others that of
believing in three. Both religions, I find, make honest men, and that
is the only point society has any right to look to. Although this mutual
freedom should produce mutual indulgence, yet I wish not to be brought
in question before the public on this or any other subject, and I
pray you to consider me as writing under that trust. I take no part
in controversies, religious or political. At the age of eighty,
tranquillity is the greatest good of life, and the strongest of our
desires that of dying in the good-will of all mankind. And with the
assurances of all my good-will to Unitarian and Trinitarian, to Whig and
Tory, accept for yourself that of my entire respect.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER, CLXIX.--TO JOHN ADAMS, February 25, 1823
TO JOHN ADAMS,
Monticello, February 25, 1823.
Dear Sir,
I received, in due time, your two favors of December the 2nd and
February the 10th, and have to acknowledge for the ladies of my native
State their obligations to you for the encomiums which you are so kind
as to bestow on them. They certainly claim no advantages over those of
their sister States, and are sensible of more favorable circumstances
existing with many of them, and happily availed, which our situation
does not offer. But the paper respecting Monticello, to which you
allude, was not written by a Virginian, but a visitant from another
State; and written by memory at least a dozen years after the visit.
This has occasioned some lapses of recollection, and a confusion of some
things in the mind of our friend, and particularly as to the volume of
slanders supposed to have been cut out of newspapers and preserved. It
would not, indeed, have been a single volume, but an Encyclopaedia in
bulk. But I never had such a volume; indeed, I rarely thought those
libels worth reading, much less preserving and remembering. At the end
of every year, I generally sorted all my pamphlets, and had them bound
according to their subjects. One of these volumes consisted of personal
altercations between individuals, and calumnies on each other. This
was lettered on the back, ‘Personalities,’ and is now in the library of
Congress. I was in the habit, also, while living apart from my family,
of cutting out of the newspapers such morsels of poetry, or tales, as
I thought would please, and of sending them to my grandchildren, who
pasted them on leaves of blank paper and formed them into a book. These
two volumes have been confounded into one in the recollection of our
friend. Her poetical imagination, too, has heightened the scenes she
visited, as well as the merits of the inhabitants, to whom her society
was a delightful gratification.
I have just finished reading O’Meara’s Bonaparte. It places him in a
higher scale of understanding than I had allotted him. I had thought him
the greatest of all military captains, but an indifferent statesman, and
misled by unworthy passions. The flashes, however, which escaped
from him in these conversations with O’Meara, prove a mind of great
expansion, although not of distinct developement and reasoning. He
seizes results with rapidity and penetration, but never explains
logically the process of reasoning by which he arrives at them. This
book, too, makes us forget his atrocities for a moment, in commiseration
of his sufferings. I will not say that the authorities of the world,
charged with the care of their country and people, had not a right
to confine him for life, as a lion or tiger, on the principles of
self-preservation. There was no safety to nations while he was permitted
to roam at large. But the putting him to death in cold blood, by
lingering tortures of mind, by vexations, insults, and deprivations, was
a degree of inhumanity to which the poisonings and assassinations of the
school of Borgia and the den of Marat never attained. The book proves,
also, that nature had denied him the moral sense, the first excellence
of well-organized man. If he could seriously and repeatedly affirm, that
he had raised himself to power without ever having committed a crime, it
proves that he wanted totally the sense of right and wrong. If he could
consider the millions of human lives which he had destroyed or caused to
be destroyed, the desolations of countries by plunderings, burnings,
and famine, the destitutions of lawful rulers of the world without the
consent of their constituents, to place his brothers and sisters on
their thrones, the cutting up of established societies of men and
jumbling them discordantly together again at his caprice, the demolition
of the fairest hopes of mankind for the recovery of their rights and
amelioration of their condition, and all the numberless train of his
other enormities; the man, I say, who could consider all these as no
crimes, must have been a moral monster, against whom every hand should
have been lifted to slay him.
You are so kind as to inquire after my health. The bone of my arm is
well knitted, but my hand and fingers are in a discouraging condition,
kept entirely useless by an oedematous swelling of slow amendment.
God bless you and continue your good health of body and mind.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLXX.--TO JOHN ADAMS, April 11, 1823
TO JOHN ADAMS.
Monticello, April 11, 1823.
Dear Sir,
The wishes expressed in your last favor, that I may continue in life and
health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of, ‘_Mon
Dieu! jusqu’a quand?_’ would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin
in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist, which I can never be;
or rather his religion was daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false
God, he did. The being described in his five points, is not the God whom
you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent Governor of
the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable
to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious
attributes of Calvin. Indeed, I think that every Christian sect gives
a great handle to atheism by their general dogma, that, without a
revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a God.
Now one sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians: the
other five sixths then, who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian
revelation, are without a knowledge of the existence of a God! This
gives completely a _gain de cause_ to the disciples of Ocellus, Timasus,
Spinosa, Diderot, and D’Holbach. The argument which they rest on as
triumphant and unanswerable is, that in every hypothesis of cosmogony,
you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to
the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to
solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say then, that it is more
simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world,
as it is now going on, and may for ever go on by the principle of
reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal
pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or creator of the world, a being
whom we see not and know not, of whose form, substance, and mode, or
place of existence, or of action, no sense informs us, no power of the
mind enables us to delineate or comprehend. On the contrary, I hold
(without appeal to revelation), that when we take a view of the
universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the
human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate
skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The
movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by
the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our
earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters, and atmosphere;
animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles;
insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or
mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is
impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is
in all this, design, cause, and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a
fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and
regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their
regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of
the necessity of a superintending power, to maintain the universe in
its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have
come into view; comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of
suns and planets, and require renovation under other laws; certain races
of animals are become extinct; and were there no restoring power, all
existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should
be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of
an intelligent and powerful agent, that, of the infinite numbers of men
who have existed through all time, they have believed, in the proportion
of a million at least to unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal
pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent
universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable,
than that of the few in the other hypothesis. Some early Christians,
indeed, have believed in the co-eternal pre-existence of both the
creator and the world, without changing their relation of cause and
effect. That this was the opinion of St. Thomas, we are informed by
Cardinal Toleta, in these words; ‘_Deus ab terno fuit jam omnipotens,
si cut cum produxit mundum. Ah aternopotuit producers mundum. Si sol ah
czterno esset, lumen ah æterno esset; et si pes, similiter vestigium.
At lumen et vestigium effectus sunt efficients solis et pedis; potuit
ergo cum causa æterna effectus coaternus esse. Cujus sententia, est S.
Thomas, theologorum primus_.’--Cardinal Toleta.
[Illustration: page364]
[Illustration: page365]
Of the nature of this being we know nothing. Jesus tells us, that ‘God
is a spirit’ (John iv. 24.), but without defining what a spirit is:
[Greek phrase] Down to the third century, we know that it was still
deemed material but of a lighter, subtler matter than our gross bodies.
So says Origen; _Deus igitur, cui anima similis est, juxta Originem,
reapte corporalis est; sed graviorum tantum ratione corporum
incorporeus_.’ These are the words of Huet in his commentary on Origen.
Origen himself says, [Greek and Latin phrase]
These two fathers were of the third century. Calvin’s character of
this Supreme Being seems chiefly copied from that of the Jews. But the
reformation of these blasphemous attributes, and substitution of those
more worthy, pure, and sublime, seems to have been the chief object of
Jesus in his discourses to the Jews: and his doctrine of the cosmogony
of the world is very clearly laid down in the three first verses of
the first chapter of John, in these words: [Greek phrase] Which, truly
translated, means, ‘In the beginning God existed, and reason [or mind]
was with God, and that mind was God. This was in the beginning with God.
All things were created by it, and without it was made not one thing
which was made.’ Yet this text, so plainly declaring the doctrine of
Jesus, that the world was created by the supreme intelligent being, has
been perverted by modern Christians to build up a second person of their
tritheism, by a mistranslation of the word _Xoyog_. One of its legitimate
meanings, indeed, is ‘a word.’ But in that sense it makes an unmeaning
jargon: while the other meaning, ‘reason,’ equally legitimate, explains
rationally the eternal pre-existence of God, and his creation of, the
world. Knowing how incomprehensible it was that ‘a word,’ the mere
action or articulation of the organs of speech could create a world,
they undertook to make of this articulation a second pre-existing being,
and ascribe to him, and not to God, the creation of the universe. The
atheist here plumes himself on the uselessness of such a God, and the
simpler hypothesis of a self-existent universe. The truth is, that the
greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves
the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a
system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation
in his genuine words. And the day will come, when the mystical
generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of
a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva
in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason,
and freedom of thought, in these United States, will do away all this
artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine
doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.
So much for your quotation of Calvin’s ‘_Mon Dieu! jusqu’a quand_’ in
which, when addressed to the God of Jesus, and our God, I join you
cordially, and await his time and will with more readiness than
reluctance. May we meet there again, in Congress, with our ancient
colleagues, and receive with them the seal of approbation, ‘Well done,
good and faithful servants.’
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLXXI.--TO THE PRESIDENT, June 11, 1823
TO THE PRESIDENT.
Monticello, June 11, 1823.
Dear Sir,
Considering that I had not been to Bedford for a twelvemonth before,
I thought myself singularly unfortunate in so timing my journey, as
to have been absent exactly at the moment of your late visit to our
neighborhood. The loss, indeed, was all my own; for in these short
interviews with you. I generally get my political compass rectified,
learn from you whereabouts we are, and correct my course again. In
exchange for this, I can give you but newspaper ideas, and little indeed
of these, for I read but a single paper, and that hastily. I find Horace
and Tacitus so much better writers than the champions of the gazettes,
that I lay those down, to take up these, with great reluctance. And on
the question you propose, whether we can, in any form, take a bolder
attitude than formerly in favor of liberty, I can give you but
commonplace ideas. They will be but the widow’s mite, and offered only
because requested. The matter which now embroils Europe, the presumption
of dictating to an independent nation the form of its government, is so
arrogant, so atrocious, that indignation, as well as moral sentiment,
enlists all our partialities and prayers in favor of one, and our
equal execrations against the other. I do not know, indeed, whether all
nations do not owe to one another a bold and open declaration of their
sympathies with the one party, and their detestation of the conduct of
the other. But farther than this we are not bound to go; and indeed, for
the sake of the world, we ought not to increase the jealousies, or draw
on ourselves the power, of this formidable confederacy. I have ever
deemed it fundamental for the United States, never to take active
part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely
distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power,
their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government,
are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war. All their
energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and
lives of their people. On our part, never had a people so favorable
a chance of trying the opposite system, of peace and fraternity with
mankind, and the direction of all our means and faculties to the
purposes of improvement instead of destruction. With Europe we have
few occasions of collision, and these, with a little prudence and
forbearance, may be generally accommodated. Of the brethren of our own
hemisphere, none are yet, or for an age to come will be, in a shape,
condition, or disposition to war against us. And the foothold, which the
nations of Europe had in either America, is slipping from under them,
so that we shall soon be rid of their neighborhood. Cuba alone seems at
present to hold up a speck of war to us. Its possession by Great Britain
would indeed be a great calamity to us. Could we induce her to join us
in guarantying its independence against all the world, except Spain, it
would be nearly as valuable to us as if it were our own. But should she
take it, I would not immediately go to war for it; because the first war
on other accounts will give it to us; or the island will give itself to
us, when, able to do so. While no duty, therefore, calls on us to take
part in the present war of Europe, and a golden harvest offers itself in
reward for doing nothing, peace and neutrality seem to be our duty and
interest. We may gratify ourselves, indeed, with a neutrality as partial
to Spain as would be justifiable without giving cause of war to her
adversary; we might and ought to avail ourselves of the happy occasion
of procuring and cementing a cordial reconciliation with her, by
giving assurance of every friendly office which neutrality admits, and
especially, against all apprehension of our intermeddling in the quarrel
with her colonies. And I expect daily and confidently to hear of a spark
kindled in France, which will employ her at home, and relieve Spain from
all further apprehensions of danger.
That England is playing false with Spain cannot be doubted. Her
government is looking one way and rowing another. It is curious to look
back a little on past events. During the ascendancy of Bonaparte, the
word among the herd of Kings was, ‘_Sauve qui peut_.’ Each shifted
for himself, and left his brethren to squander and do the same as they
could. After the battle of Waterloo, and the military possession of
France, they rallied and combined in common cause, to maintain each
other against any similar and future danger. And in this alliance,
Louis, now avowedly, and George, secretly but solidly, were of the
contracting parties; and there can be no doubt that the allies are bound
by treaty to aid England with their armies, should insurrection take
place among her people. The coquetry she is now playing off between
her people and her allies is perfectly understood by the latter,
and accordingly gives no apprehensions to France, to whom it is all
explained. The diplomatic correspondence she is now displaying, these
double papers fabricated merely for exhibition, in which she makes
herself talk of morals and principle, as if her qualms of conscience
would not permit her to go all lengths with her Holy Allies, are all to
gull her own people. It is a theatrical farce, in which the five powers
are the actors, England the Tartuffe, and her people the dupes. Playing
thus so dextrously into each other’s hands, and their own persons
seeming secured, they are now looking to their privileged orders.
These faithful auxiliaries, or accomplices, must be saved. This war is
evidently that of the general body of the aristocracy, in which England
is also acting her part. ‘Save but the Nobles, and there shall be no
war,’ says she, masking her measures at the same time under the form of
friendship and mediation, and hypocritically, while a party, offering
herself as a judge, to betray those whom she is not permitted openly to
oppose. A fraudulent neutrality, if neutrality at all, is all Spain will
get from her. And Spain, probably, perceives this, and willingly winks
at it rather than have her weight thrown openly into the other scale.
But I am going beyond my text, and sinning against the adage of carrying
coals to Newcastle. In hazarding to you my crude and uninformed notions
of things beyond my cognizance, only be so good as to remember that it
is at your request, and with as little confidence on my part as profit
on yours. You will do what is right, leaving the people of Europe to act
their follies and crimes among themselves, while we pursue in good faith
the paths of peace and prosperity. To your judgment we are willingly
resigned, with sincere assurances of affectionate esteem and respect.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLXXII.--TO JUDGE JOHNSON, June 12, 1823
TO JUDGE JOHNSON.
Monticello, June 12, 1823.
Dear Sir,