These two fathers were of the third century.  Calvin’s character of this Supreme Being seems chiefly copied from that of the Jews.  But the reformation of these blasphemous attributes, and substitution of those more worthy, pure, and sublime, seems to have been the chief object of Jesus in his discourses to the Jews:  and his doctrine of the cosmogony of the world is very clearly laid down in the three first verses of the first chapter of John, in these words:  [Greek phrase] Which, truly translated, means, ’In the beginning God existed, and reason [or mind] was with God, and that mind was God.  This was in the beginning with God.  All things were created by it, and without it was made not one thing which was made.’  Yet this text, so plainly declaring the doctrine of Jesus, that the world was created by the supreme intelligent being, has been perverted by modern Christians to build up a second person of their tritheism, by a mistranslation of the word Xoyog.  One of its legitimate meanings, indeed, is ‘a word.’  But in that sense it makes an unmeaning jargon:  while the other meaning, ‘reason,’ equally legitimate, explains rationally the eternal pre-existence of God, and his creation of, the world.  Knowing how incomprehensible it was that ‘a word,’ the mere action or articulation of the organs of speech could create a world, they undertook to make of this articulation a second pre-existing being, and ascribe to him, and not to God, the creation of the universe.  The atheist here plumes himself on the uselessness of such a God, and the simpler hypothesis of a self-existent universe.  The truth is, that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words.  And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.  But we may hope that the dawn of reason, and freedom of thought, in these United States, will do away all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.

So much for your quotation of Calvin’s ’Mon Dieu! jusqu’a quand’in which, when addressed to the God of Jesus, and our God, I join you cordially, and await his time and will with more readiness than reluctance.  May we meet there again, in Congress, with our ancient colleagues, and receive with them the seal of approbation, ’Well done, good and faithful servants.’

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CLXXI.—­TO THE PRESIDENT, June 11, 1823

TO THE PRESIDENT.

Monticello, June 11, 1823.

Dear Sir,