It is due, also, to that illustrious individual to say, that, in all my intercourse with him, I never heard an observation that savored, in the slightest degree, of impiety. His religious belief harmonized more closely with that of the Unitarians than of any other denomination, but it was liberal, and untrammelled by sectarian feelings and prejudices.[560]
But Doctor Dunglison's declaration is somewhat unsatisfactory and misleading, for Jefferson once gave his own definition of Unitarianism. From a letter he wrote to James Smith in 1822 it appears he was not ready to join the Unitarian Church any more than any other:
About Unitarianism, the doctrine of the early ages of Christianity ... the pure and simple unity of the Creator of the universe, is now all but ascendant in the Eastern States; it is dawning in the West, and advancing towards the South; and I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.... I write with freedom, because, while I claim a right to believe in one God, if so my reason tells me, I yield as freely to others that of believing in three.[561]
On the other hand, one might easily be misled by some declarations of Jefferson to his more intimate friends. "I am a materialist—I am an Epicurian," he wrote on several instances to John Adams, Thomas Cooper and Short, with whom he felt that he could discuss religious questions more freely than with any others. Rejecting the famous Cogito ergo sum of Descartes, he fell back when in doubt on his "habitual anodyne": "I feel therefore I exist." This in his opinion did not imply the sole existence of matter, but simply that he could not "conceive thought to be an action of a particular organisation of matter, formed for the purpose by its Creator, as well as that attraction is an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone." Then he added: "I am supported in my creed of materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys and the Stewarts. At what age of the Christian Church this heresy of immaterialism or masked atheism, crept in, I do not exactly know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it."[562]
In the same sense he could write to Judge Augustus S. Woodward: "Jesus himself, the Founder of our religion, was unquestionably a Materialist as to man. In all His doctrines of the resurrection, he teaches expressly that the body is to rise in substances."[563]
His definition of Epicurism would seem equally remote from the popular acceptation, and certainly Jefferson was never of those who could deserve the old appellation of Epicuri de grege porcus; for his Epicurus is the philosopher "whose doctrines contain everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."[564]
All through the year 1813 and on many occasions after that date, Adams tried to draw him out on the question of religion. "For," as he said, "these things are to me, at present, the marbles and nine-pins of old age; I will not say beads and prayer books." But Jefferson could not have declared, as did his old friend: "For more than sixty years I have been attentive to this great subject. Controversies between Calvinists and Arminians, Trinitarians and Unitarians, Deists and Christians, Atheists and both, have attracted my attention, whenever the singular life I have led would admit, to all these questions."[565]
Not so with Jefferson, who felt a real abhorrence for theological discussions and considered them as a sheer waste of time. They belonged to a past age and were to be buried in oblivion lest they create again an atmosphere of fanaticism and intolerance; at best, they could be left to the clergy. But tolerant as he was, there were certain doctrines against which Jefferson revolted even in later life, as he probably did when a student at William and Mary:
I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was dæmonism. If ever man worshipped a false God, he did. The God described in his five points, is not the God whom you acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent Governor of the world; but a dæmon of malignant spirit.
But right after this virulent denunciation comes a most interesting admission. If Jefferson's God was not the God of Calvin, he was just as remote from the mechanistic materialism of D'Holbach and La Mettrie as he was from Calvinism and predestination. Leaving aside all questions of dogmas and revelation he held that: