This being the case, it remained to determine whether man could not find somewhere a code of morality that would express the precepts impressed in our hearts. In his youth, Jefferson had copied and accepted as a matter of course the statement of Bolingbroke that:
It is not true that Christ revealed an entire body of ethics, proved to be the law of nature from principles of reason and reaching all duties of life.... A system thus collected from the writings of the ancient heathen moralists, of Tully, of Seneca, of Epictetus, and others, would be more full, more entire, more coherent, and more clearly deduced from unquestionable principles of knowledge.[571]
In order to realize how far away Jefferson had drawn from his radicalism, it is only necessary to go back to his "Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, compared with those of others", written for Benjamin Rush, in 1803, after reading Doctor Priestley's little treatise "Of Socrates and Jesus compared."[572] There he had declared that
His moral doctrines relating to kindred and friends, were more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers, and ... they went far in inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids. A development of this head will evince the peculiar superiority of the system of Jesus over all others.
Jefferson had been won over to Christianity by the superior social value of the morals of Jesus. In that sense, he could already say, "I am a Christian, in the only sense in which He wished any one to be, sincerely attached to His doctrines, in preference to all others."
This profession of faith made publicly might have assuaged some of the fierce attacks directed against Jefferson on the ground of his "infidelity", and yet even at that time he emphatically begged Doctor Rush not to make it public, for "it behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself ... to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by answering questions of faith, which the laws have left between God and himself." To a certain extent, however, his famous "Life and Morals of Jesus", compiled during the last ten years of his life[573] may well be considered an indirect and yet categorical recantation of Bolingbroke's haughty dogmatism. Age, experience, observation had mellowed the Stoic. He was not yet ready to accept as a whole the dogmas of Christianity, but the superiority of the morals of Jesus over the tenets of the "heathen moralists" did not any longer leave any doubt in his mind.
Whether after the death of the body something of man survived, was an entirely different question—one that human reason could not answer satisfactorily. It cannot even be stated with certainty that he would have agreed with John Adams when the latter wrote: "Il faut trancher le mot. What is there in life to attach us to it but the hope of a future and a better? It is a cracker, a rocket, a fire-work at best."[574]
He never denied categorically the existence of a future life, but this life was a thing in itself, and after all, it was worth living. Altogether this world was a pretty good place, and when John Adams asked him whether he would agree to live his seventy-three years over again, he answered energetically: "Yea.—I think with you," he added, "that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt to us.... My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail, but not oftener than the foreboding of the gloomy."[575] His old friend was far from attaining such an equanimity and could not help envying the Sage of Monticello sailing his bark "Hope with her gay ensigns displayed at the prow, Fear with her hobgoblins behind the stern. Hope springs eternal and all is that endures...." But Jefferson was bolstered up in his confident attitude by the intimate conviction that he had done good work, that he had contributed his best to the most worthy cause and that he had not labored in vain.
This was not only a good world, but it was already much better than when he had entered it. He had