When I commenced this letter to you, my dear Sir, on Mr. Law’s memorial, I expected a short one would have answered that.  But as I advanced, the subject branched itself before me into so many collateral questions, that even the rapid views I have taken of each have swelled the volume of my letter beyond my expectations, and, I fear, beyond your patience.  Yet on a revisal of it, I find no part which has not so much bearing on the subject as to be worth merely the time of perusal.  I leave it then as it is; and will add only the assurances of my constant and affectionate esteem and respect.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXIV.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, October 13, 1813

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, October 13, 1813.

Dear Sir,

Since mine of August the 22nd, I have received your favors of August the 16th, September the 2nd, 14th, 15th, and, and Mrs. Adams’s, of September the 20th.  I now send you, according to your request, a copy of the syllabus.  To fill up this skeleton with arteries, with veins, with nerves, muscles, and flesh, is really beyond my time and information.  Whoever could undertake it, would find great aid in Enfield’s judicious abridgment of Brucker’s History of Philosophy, in which he has reduced five or six quarto volumes, of one thousand pages each of Latin closely printed, to two moderate octavos of English open type.

To compare the morals of the Old, with those of the New Testament, would require an attentive study of the former, a search through all its books for its precepts, and through all its history for its practices, and the principles they prove.  As commentaries, too, on these, the philosophy of the Hebrews must be inquired into, their Mishna, their Gemara, Cabbala, Jezirah, Sonar, Cosri, and their Talmud, must be examined and understood, in order to do them full justice.  Brucker, it would seem, has gone deeply into these repositories of their ethics, and Enfield his epitomizer, concludes in these words.  ’Ethics were so little understood among the Jews, that, in their whole compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral subjects.  Their books of morals chiefly consisted in a minute enumeration of duties.  From the law of Moses were deduced six hundred and thirteen precepts, which were divided into two classes, affirmative and negative, two hundred and forty-eight in the former, and three hundred and sixty-five in the latter.  It may serve to give the reader some idea of the low state of moral philosophy among the Jews in the middle age, to add, that of the two hundred and forty-eight affirmative precepts, only three were considered as obligatory upon women; and that, in order to obtain salvation, it was judged sufficient to fulfil any one single law in the hour of death; the observance of the rest being deemed necessary, only to increase the felicity of the future life.  What a wretched