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To Dr. Benjamin Rush, with a Syllabus Washington, Apr. 21, 1803
DEAR SIR, -- In some of the delightful conversations with you,
in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the
afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then
laboring, the  Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then
promised you, that one day or other, I would give you my views of it.
They are the result of a life of inquiry & reflection, and very
different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who
know nothing ofmy 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 he wished any one to be; sincerely
attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to
himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any
other. At the short intervals since these conversations, when I
could justifiably abstract my mind from public affairs, the subject
has been under my contemplation. But the more I considered it, the
more it expanded beyond the measure of either my time or information.
In the moment of my late departure from Monticello, I received from
Doctr Priestley, his little treatise of "Socrates & Jesus compared."
This being a section of the general view I had taken of the field, it
became a subject of reflection while on the road, and unoccupied
otherwise. The result was, to arrange in my mind a syllabus, or
outline of such an estimate of the comparative merits of
Christianity, as I wished to see executed by some one of more leisure
and information for the task, than myself. This I now send you, as
the only discharge of my promise I can probably ever execute. And in
confiding it to you, I know it will not be exposed to the malignant
perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new
misrepresentations & calumnies. I am moreover averse to the
communication of my religious tenets to the public; because it would
countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them
before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself
into that inquisition over the rights of conscience, which the laws
have so justly proscribed. It behoves every man who values liberty
of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of
others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his
own. It behoves him, too, in his own case, 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 &
himself.
Accept my affectionate salutations.
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