Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXII.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, August 22, 1813

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, August 22, 1813.

Dear Sir,

Since my letter of June the 27th, I am in your debt for many; all of which I have read with infinite delight.  They open a wide field for reflection, and offer subjects enough to occupy the mind and the pen indefinitely.  I must follow the good example you have set; and when I have not time to take up every subject, take up a single one.  Your approbation of my outline to Dr. Priestley is a great gratification to me; and I very much suspect that if thinking men would have the courage to think for themselves, and to speak what they think, it would be found they do not differ in religious opinions, as much as is supposed.  I remember to have heard Dr. Priestley say, that if all England would candidly examine themselves, and confess, they would find that Unitarianism was really the religion of all:  and I observe a bill is now depending in parliament for the relief of Anti-Trinitarians.  It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one:  to divide mankind by a single letter into

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But this constitutes the craft, the power, and the profit of the priests.  Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies.  We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.

It is with great pleasure I can inform you, that Priestley finished the comparative view of the doctrines of the philosophers of antiquity, and of Jesus, before his death; and that it was printed soon after.  And with still greater pleasure, that I can have a copy of his work forwarded from Philadelphia, by a correspondent there, and presented for your acceptance, by the same mail which carries you this, or very soon after.  The branch of the work which the title announces, is executed with learning and candor, as was every thing Priestley wrote:  but perhaps a little hastily; for he felt himself pressed by the hand of death.  The Abbe Batteux had, in fact, laid the foundation of this part in his ‘Causes Premieres’; with which he has given us the originals of Ocellus and Timzeus, who first committed the doctrines of Pythagoras to writing:  and Enfield, to whom the Doctor refers, had done it more copiously.  But he has omitted the important branch, which, in your letter of August the 9th, you say you have never seen executed, a comparison of the morality of the Old Testament with that of the New.  And yet, no two things were ever more unlike.  I ought not to have asked him to give it.  He dared not.  He would have been eaten alive by his intolerant brethren, the Cannibal priests.  And yet, this was really the most interesting branch of the work.