One day a grandchild of Mr. Jefferson asked him why he would not state his religious convictions, he replied:
"If I inform you of mine, they will influence yours—I will not take the responsibility of directing any one's views on the subject."
In his letters, he enters so frankly into his beliefs that nothing is left to conjecture. He believed in God—one, not three.
He believed in a future life in which we should know those whom we had known here. He believed that religion consisted in being good and doing good.
He believed in a benevolent design in creation. If he can be classed with any church at all, he was a Unitarian. He was certainly not more orthodox than that. In one of his letters he calls himself a materialist, contrasting himself with Christ, who was a spiritualist. He rejected the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the Holy Ghost.
He classed Jesus with Socrates and other great teachers, regretting that he wrote nothing, and that we have to take so much of his doctrine on hearsay.
He (Jesus) had no one to write for him as Socrates and Epictetus had, but, on the contrary, the learned men of his country were all against him for fear that his teachings might undermine their power and riches. His doctrines therefore fell to ignorant men, who wrote from memory long after the transactions had passed.
Notwithstanding these disadvantages, Jesus presented a system of morals which if filled up in the spirit of the rich fragments he left us would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man. Whether Mr. Jefferson was acquainted with the system of morals taught among the Hindus long before the time of Jesus nowhere appears.
It would seem that he compared the system of Jesus with the moral teachings of the Jews, the Romans, and the Greeks—not with those of ancient Egypt or of India.
He says that Jesus, like other reformers who try to benefit mankind, fell a victim to the jealousy and combination of the altar and the throne. Hence he did not reach the full maturity and energy of his reasoning faculties, and his doctrines were defective as a whole.
What he did say has come down to us mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible.
These fragmentary doctrines have been still more disfigured by the corruptions of schismatizing followers who have found an interest in perverting the simple doctrines he taught, frittering them into subtleties, obscuring them with jargon until they have caused good men to reject the whole in disgust, and to view Jesus himself as an impostor. He contended that it was the priest—not Jesus himself—who put forward the claims that his origin was miraculous and divine. He read the Bible just as he read Euripides, Aeschylus, or Xenophon. From the New Testament he made the volume called Jefferson's Bible, which contains the life and teachings of Christ, omitting everything about his miraculous birth and resurrection.
In writing to a friend about this little book Mr. Jefferson regretted that he did not have time to prepare a similar volume from the teachings of Epicurus—a philosopher whom he defends against Cicero and the Stoics. Writing to the son of his dearest friend, Dabney Carr, he tells this young man, his nephew, to put the Bible on a par with Livy and Tacitus, to read the one just as he would the others; and by inference as plain as inference can be, advises him to reject the story that Joshua made the sun stand still, and that Christ was the son of God, born of a Virgin, who reversed all the laws of nature and ascended bodily into heaven. He tells his young nephew that when he reads of a miracle in the Bible he ought to class it with the showers of blood and the statues and animals which in the books of Livy and Tacitus are made to speak. In other letters he charges in effect that the early founders of the Christian Church borrowed the idea of the Trinity from the Roman Cerberus, which had one body and three heads. Calvin's creed excited his especial horror; and his language was never more violent than when denouncing it.
But the doctrine of the Trinity aroused his indignation also because it compelled the individual to take leave of his senses. He thought that to compel a sane person to declare that he believed three to be one, and one to be three, was a priestly triumph over common sense which was degrading to the human race.
In 1822 he wrote, "I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."
And in his letter to Pickering he speaks glowingly of what might result if we could get back to the pure and simple doctrine of Jesus—knocking down artificial scaffolding of the Trinitarians and doing away with their incomprehensible jargon that three are one and one are three. He said that the Apocalypse was the ravings of a maniac. Nobody could possibly understand what it meant.
But what theologian ever wrote a more beautiful letter than this, which the great Deist left for his little namesake, Thomas Jefferson Smith:
"This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in his grave before you can weigh its counsel. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not of the ways of Providence.
"So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it be permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard."
This was written the year before he died.
To Peter Carr, son of Dabney Carr, he wrote:
"Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give up earth itself, and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act."
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