in the most friendly dispositions, oppress me with their concerns, their pursuits, their projects, inventions, and speculations, political, moral, religious, mechanical, mathematical, historical, &c. &c. &c.  I hope the appeal will bring me relief, and that I shall be left to, exercise and enjoy correspondence with the friends I love, and on subjects which they, or my own inclinations, present.  In that case, your letters shall not be so long on my files unanswered, as sometimes they have been to my great mortification.

To advert now to the subjects of those of December the 12th and 16th.  Tracy’s Commentaries on Montesquieu have never been published in the original.  Duane printed a translation from the original manuscript a few years ago.  It sold, I believe, readily, and whether a copy can now be had, I doubt.  If it can, you will receive it from my bookseller in Philadelphia, to whom I now write for that purpose.  Tracy comprehends, under the word ‘Ideology’ all the subjects which the French term Morale, as the correlative to Physique, His works on Logic, Government, Political Economy, and Morality, he considers as making up the circle of ideological subjects, or of those which are within the scope of the understanding, and not of the senses.  His Logic occupies exactly the ground of Locke’s work on the Understanding.  The translation of that on Political Economy is now printing; but it is no translation of mine.  I have only had the correction of it, which was, indeed, very laborious. Le premier jet having been by some one who understood neither French nor English, it was impossible to make it more than faithful.  But it is a valuable work.

The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words, ‘Be just and good,’ is that in which all our inquiries must end; as the riddles of all the priesthoods end in four more, ’Ubi panis, ibi deus.’  What all agree in, is probably right; what no two agree in, most probably wrong.  One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately, with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change in my religion much spoken of in some circles.  Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed.  My answer was, ’Say nothing of my religion.  It is known to my God and myself alone.  Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.’  Affectionately adieu.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXL.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, May 5, 1817

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, May 5, 1817.

Dear Sir,