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objects, they enjoyed abroad the same scientifick correspondence, and arrived at the same classical honours; and the traveller sees with pride their names associated and inscribed on the contributions which America has made to the learned cabinets of Europe. "Dr. Franklin, also, is more known as a writer than an orator. Some of his speeches are reported. Though they are distinguished by the peculiar and extraordinary features of his mind, and were always delivered with effect, yet it is remarked, that he never spoke longer than ten minutes. Mr. Jefferson too, wanting strength of voice, relied altogether upon his power of writing; and as nature is observed to compensate the loss of one sense by giving more force to another, so Mr. Jefferson's disuse of publick speaking seems to have thrown additional energies in his written composition."

Mr. Jefferson was the acknowledged head of the republican party, from the period of its organization down to that of his retirement from publick life. The unbounded praise and blame which he received as a politician, must be left for the judgement of the historian and posterity.

In person, Mr. Jefferson was tall, erect, and well formed, though thin; his countenance was bland and expressive; his conversation fluent, imaginative, various, and eloquent. Few men equalled him in the faculty of pleasing in personal intercourse and acquiring ascendency in political connexion. His complexion was fair, and his features remarkably expressive; his forehead broad, the nose not larger than the common size, and the whole face square, and expressive of deep

thinking. In his conversation he was cheerful and enthusiastick; and his language was singularly correct. and vivacious. His manners were simple and unaffected, mingled, however, with much native but unob- trusive dignity.

In disposition, Mr. Jefferson was full of liberality and benevolence. His charity was unostentatious, but bountiful; a certain portion of his revenue was regularly applied to maintain and extend it; and it has been remarked, that those who, since his death, have travelled in that part of Virginia where he resided, could not fail to be struck with the repeated, the grateful, and the unpremeditated tributes which are every where paid to his memory-the constant appeal to his opinions, the careful remembrance and relation of every anecdote affecting his person and his actions. In his family he was hospitable to a degree which caused poverty to throw some dark shadows over the evening of his life; he was kind to his domesticks, by whom it was remarked, that no instance had ever occurred in which he had lost his temper; he was warmly attached and devoted to his children and relatives, whom he loved to assemble around him; and we have seen how bitterly he felt the blow which deprived him of one of his two children-a calamity which seems to have shaken his affectionate nature to its centre. The simplicity of the domestick habits of Mr. Jefferson, have been already discovered in our extracts from his correspondence.

The correspondence of Mr. Jefferson was varied. and extensive, to a degree that became extremely irksome in his latter years. On this subject, in the year

1822, he thus expressed himself to Mr. Adams: "I' do not know how far you may suffer, as I do, under the persecution of letters, of which every mail brings a fresh load. They are letters of inquiry, for the most part, always of good will, sometimes from friends whom I esteem, but much oftener from persons whose names are unknown to me, but written kindly and civilly, and to which, therefore, civility requires answers. I happened to turn to my letter list some time ago, and a curiosity was excited to count those received in a single year. I found the number to be one thou-sand two hundred and sixty-seven, many of them requiring answers of elaborate research, and all to be answered with due attention and consideration."

A few words respecting the religious opinions of Mr. Jefferson, and we close the volume. He has been represented as it suited party rancour: at one time, as the atheistical desperado, warring against the God of heaven; at another, as the ribald scoffer, throwing malignant sneers upon the declarations of His word. But he was far, very far, from being either of these. However opposed Mr. Jefferson may have been to what he considered the corruptions or abuses of Christianity, yet to the spirit and precepts of the gospel he was strongly attached; and of the character of our Saviour he was a warm and professed admirer. His correspondence is full of declarations to this effect, and they are given as the frank and undisguised sentiments of his heart. In a letter to his friend, Dr. Rush, he thus gives him his views of the Christian religion: They are," says he, "the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian

system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity, I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference of all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other." Accompanying this letter was a syllabus of an estimate of the merit of the doctrines of Jesus, in which, among other reasons, he assigns the following for the intrinsick superiority of the divine lawgiver:

"1. He corrected the Deism of the Jews, confirming them in the belief of one only God, and giving them. juster notions of his attributes and government.

"2. His moral doctrines, relating to kindred and friends, were more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers, and greatly more so than those of the Jews; and they went far beyond both in inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbours and countrymen, but to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants, and common aids. A developement of this head will evince the peculiar superiority of the system of Jesus over all others.

"3. The precepts of philosophy, and of the Hebrew code, laid hold of actions only. He pushed his scruti nies into the heart of man; erected his tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.

"4. He taught, emphatically, the doctrine of a future

state, which was either doubted or disbelieved by the Jews; and wielding it with efficacy, as an important incentive, supplementary to the other motives to moral

conduct."

In a letter to John Adams are these words: "If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, 'that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.'But if the moral precepts innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being-if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and Deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, 'something not fit to be named, even indeed, a hell.'"

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In another letter to Dr. Waterhouse, he thus express-es himself: "The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.

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1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect. "2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.

"3. That to love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself, is the sum of religion."

Certainly all this is not the language of an enemy to Christianity. It would be a forced service to enrol under the banners of atheism him who has expressed such an unhesitating reliance on the controlling energies of a superintending Providence; and one would suppose the man who declares that 'this earth would be a hell without the religion of Jesus,' would

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