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