The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
MORAL PRINCIPLES / ESPOUSED BY JESUS CHRIST
In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of
1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the
crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian
religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you, that one
day or other, I would give you my views of it. They are the result of
a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that
anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my
opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but
not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the
only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his
doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every
human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other. At
the short intervals since these conversations, when I could
justifiably abstract my mind from public affairs, the subject has been
under my contemplation. But the more I considered it, the more it
expanded beyond the measure of either my time or information. In the
moment of my late departure from Monticello, I received from Doctor
Priestley, his little treatise of "Socrates and Jesus compared."
This being a section of the general view I had taken of the field, it
became a subject of reflection while on the road, and unoccupied
otherwise. The result was, to arrange in my mind a syllabus, or
outline of such an estimate of the comparative merits of Christianity,
as I wished to see executed by some one of more leisure and
information for the task, than myself. This I now send you, as the
only discharge of my promise I can probably ever execute. And in
confiding it to you, I know it will not be exposed to the malignant
perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new
misrepresentations and calumnies. I am, moreover, averse to the
communication of my religious tenets to the public; because it would
countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them
before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself
into that inquisition over the rights of conscience, which the laws
have so justly proscribed. It behooves every man who values liberty of
conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of
others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of
concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by
answering questions of faith, which the laws have left between God and
himself.
to Benjamin Rush, 21 April 1803
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