University of Virginia Library

III. Religious Views

Whilst the University of Virginia has always stood for
the freest principles of government and a strict interpretation
of the Constitution, it has also stood equally unequivocally
for extreme opposition to every form of sectarian
interference in the administration of its affairs.
This attitude too was derived from Jefferson's impress in
the beginning. Again we must go back,—this time to a
study of the opinions which he held and uttered on the
subject of religion; for with such a study omitted, it

would be impossible to comprehend why it was that, in an
age when all the existing colleges offered a long course in
theology, the University of Virginia was founded without
the smallest consideration for any religious dogma
or denomination. With one breath, Jefferson could exclaim,
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility
to every form of tyranny over the minds of men,"
and with the next, he could truthfully say, "I have never
attempted to make a convert or wished to change another's
creed. I inquire after no man's religion, and I trouble
none with mine." "I am for encouraging the progress
of science in all its branches," he wrote to Elbridge
Gerry, in 1799, "and not for awing the human mind by
stories of rawheads and bloody bones to a distrust of its
own vision."

And yet the relations between man and his Creator,
and the responsibilities which resulted therefrom, were
pronounced by him to be the most important of all to
every human being, and, therefore, the most obligatory
on each person to inquire into. Of the different systems
of morality which he had investigated,—and he had been
a close student of religious history,—that of Christ always
rose before his mind's eye as the purest, the most
benevolent, and the most sublime. Epictetus and Epicurus,
he said, formulated a code of ethical laws by which
the individual should govern himself; Christ went a great
distance further by enforcing upon men the charities and
the duties which they owed to their fellowman. He had
inculcated a universal philanthropy far above the loftiest
imagination of the ancient philosophers or of the Jews
themselves. "Had his doctrines," Jefferson added,
"been preached always as pure as they came from his
lips, the whole world would have been converted to
Christianity." Who had perverted the original complexion,

the primitive spirit, of those doctrines? The
priest, was his reply. In every country and in every age,
he said, the priest had been the foe of liberty. He was
always an ally of despots, and ready to connive at their
abuses in return for protection for his own. The most
culpable members of the living priesthood, he asserted,
were the Presbyterian ministers; they are, he wrote William
Short "the most intolerant of all sects, the most
tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the lawgiver,
if such a word could now be obtained, to put the
torch to the pile. They pant to re-establish by law the
Holy Inquisition."

The acridness with which he assailed the whole clerical
profession had its origin, not so much in any real knowledge
of its history, as in resentment at the attacks which
many of that profession had made on him in retaliation
for his political and legislative changes. His successful
effort to separate the Church from the State in Virginia
had naturally enough aroused the vehement hostility of
the clergymen of the former Episcopal Establishment,
while his Republican principles had been sourly obnoxious
to the Federalist Congregational ministers of New England,
who never ceased to denounce him from their pulpits
as that crowning abomination, a French infidel; and this
charge was echoed elsewhere also. "It is so impossible
to contradict all these lies," he wrote Monroe, in 1800,
"that I am determined to contradict none, for while I
should be engaged with one, they would publish twenty
new ones." As a matter of fact, Jefferson was, in none
of his religious opinions, deserving of the anathema of
atheism. In his youth, he said, he had been "fond of
speculations which seemed to promise insight into that
hidden country, the land of spirits"; but observing at
length that he was tangled up in as great a coil of doubt

as at first, he, for many years, ceased to meditate seriously,
or at all, on the subject of religion. "I reposed
my head," he consoled himself with placid philosophy,
"on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator
has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should
be forced to use it." In a later phase of mind, he relied
exclusively on the practice of virtue as the corner-stone
of the only true religion. "I have thought it better,"
he said, "to nourish the good passions, and control the
bad, in order to merit an inheritance in a state of being
of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future
to Him who has been so good for the past." "It is in
our acts and not in our words that our religion must be
read." "Men should show no uneasiness about the different
roads they may pursue, as believing them to be the
shortest to their last abode, but following the guidance of
a good conscience, they should be happy in the hope that,
by those different paths, they shall meet together at the
end of the journey."

"Reason is the only oracle given men by Heaven," he
said on another occasion, "and they are answerable, not
for the rightness, but for the uprightness of the decision."
"I am," he added, "a Christian in the only sense Christ
wished any one to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines
in preference to all others." Under the influence of his
reverence for those doctrines, he made up, from the pages
of the Bible, with the use of a pair of scissors, a volume
which he entitled the Philosophy of Jesus, and which he
panegyrized as the most beautiful and precious morsel of
ethics that existed. It comprised numerous verses picked
out here and there from the texts of the Gospels, and arranged
in strict conformity to time and subject. That
these texts encouraged him to believe that the soul would
not perish with the body is proven by many of his utterances

during his last years. "The time is not far distant,"
he said in a letter to John Adams, "at which we
are to repose in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering
bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting
with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom
we shall love and never lose again." And when his
daughter Maria died, he declared, in reply to words of
sympathy from John Page, that "every step shortens the
distance we have to go. The end of the journey is in
sight. We sorrow not then as others who have no hope,
but look forward to the day which joins us to the great
majority." "Your age of eighty-four and mine of
eighty-one," he wrote to John Cartwright in England,
"ensures us a speedy meeting. We will then commune
at leisure and more fully, on the good and evil, which, in
the course of our long lives, we have both witnessed."
And at the close of his last interview with the members
of his weeping family, he was heard to murmur, "Lord,
now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

Whatever may have been the religious tenets of Jefferson
at bottom, he was of the clear conviction that civil
government could not legitimately take even the smallest
notice of men's religious opinions, unless those opinions
were used as an engine for the destruction of peace and
order. Then and only then could the civil officers intervene.
"What has been the effect of religious coercion?"
he asks in the Notes on Virginia. "To make one half
of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." He
urged that differences of view were advantageous to religion;
that the several sects performed the office of
censor morum over each other; and that to make one sect
the Church of the State, and then to compel the other
sects to support it as offering the only correct religious
creed, was usurping the right of private judgment, and

imposing an unjustifiable and intolerable yoke upon those
who rejected that creed and all its ordinances. "I cannot
give up my guidance to the magistrate," he declared,
"because he knows no more of the way to Heaven than I
do, and is less concerned to direct me right than I am to
go right. The magistrate has no power but what the
people gave. The people have not given him the care of
souls because they could not. They could not because no
man has the right to abandon the care of his salvation
to another." Holding as he did these opinions, which
appear to be self-evident enough in our more liberal age,
and which, doubtless, were widely entertained even at that
period, Jefferson was fully resolved to tear up the Episcopal
Establishment of Virginia root and branch, whenever
the hour seemed opportune to do so. He was eager, as
we have seen, to raze the whole system of monopoly,
which, in 1776, he found in existence in the new Commonwealth;
but he was particularly impatient to demolish that
branch of it which was represented in the union of the
Church with the State. How revolutionary at that time,
and in that community, were the sentiments which were
hurrying him on, a few facts bearing on the condition of
the Dissenters then will clearly show.

The Hanover Presbytery complained as late as 1774
that their ministrations were by law confined to a small
number of places, in spite of the sparse population; that
they were not permitted to assemble at night; that they
were compelled to keep open the doors of their meetinghouses
in the day while the services were in progress;
and, finally, that they were deprived of the right as a
corporation to hold estates and receive gifts and legacies
in support of their schools and churches. They prayed
that the misdemeanors of Dissenters should be punished
by ordinances equally binding on all citizens regardless of

their religious creeds. "We ask for nothing," they declared,
"but what justice says ought to be ours; for as
ample privileges as any of our fellow-subjects enjoy."
And they concluded with the proud reminder that the petition
was not that of a sect sunk in obscurity, but of one
that belonged to the national church of Scotland, Holland,
Switzerland and Northern Europe.

The persecutions of the Baptists alone were a sharp
enough spur to quicken Jefferson's fierce drive for reform.
In the same year, Madison wrote from Montpelier to a
friend, "There are at this time in the adjoining county
not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail
for publishing their religious sentiments, which, in the
main, are very orthodox." These prisoners were Baptists.
About one year after the date of this letter, and
less than one year before the Declaration of Independence,
an anonymous signer urged every member of the
Church of England who had subscribed for the endowment
of Hampden-Sidney College, a Presbyterian institution,
to withdraw his contribution until that institution
had been put under masters who belonged to the Established
Church. "If this school is thus encouraged," so
the writer warned, "we may reasonably expect, in a few
years, to see our Senate House as well as our pulpits
filled with Dissenters, and thus they may, by an easy transition,
secure the Establishment in their favor."

In his legislative innovations, Jefferson merely rose to
the cry of these Dissenters, who naturally and rightly demanded
the alteration of the laws relating to religious
worship. An open and liberal mind like his could not fail
to respond to the just appeal which the Presbyterians and
Baptists were so persistently making for religious freedom
and civic equality; nor did he halt in his effort to
force so desirable a change, because, in winning the good

will of the outlawed denominations in general, he knew
that he was inviting the hatred of the one which had enjoyed
the exclusive privileges that he was seeking to demolish.
He allowed no inherited church affilations of
his own to stay his hand in striking the blow of separation.
He was brought up in the Anglican creed and ceremonial;
he still preferred the Anglican form at least to all others
in spite of his unorthodox opinions; and he had no wish
to place his native sect on a lower footing than that of
the rest. It was absolute equality before the law alone
which he aimed at. He had observed that Pennsylvania
and New York had flourished without any establishment
at all; and that every denomination in those communities
was prosperous and in harmonious relations with each
other. What was the explanation? It was the tolerance
with which all were treated, he replied, and the entire
absence of special privilege; there was no jealousy,
no envy, no jostling, no bickering; each stood upon its own
platform, and made no claim not founded upon its intrinsic
merit.

In 1776, the Virginia Convention declared that freedom
of religious worship was a natural right; but this
action was not satisfactory to Jefferson because that body
adopted no measure which would safeguard this right.
In October of the same year, the Convention, reassembling
as Senate and House of Delegates, repealed all the
statutes which branded the religious opinions of Dissenters
as criminal; and it also suspended the existing provisions
for the payment of salaries to the Episcopal clergymen.
The question of what constituted heresy, however,
was reserved for the interpretation of the common law.
In 1777, the General Court was impowered to pass upon
every case of the kind which should arise within the jurisdiction
of that branch of jurisprudence. At this time, the

Act of 1705 was still in force; whoever denied the existence
of the Deity, or expressed disbelief in the Trinity, or
the Christian tenets as a whole, or asserted that there were
more gods than one, or that the Scriptures were of human
origin, was liable to conviction for felony. Such, exclaimed
Jefferson, with undisguised bitterness, was the
religious slavery in which still remained a people who, by
every form of sacrifice, involving life and fortune alike,
had won their political and social freedom!

The great Act drafted by him to create a religious
equilibrium that would be comparable to the political one
already secured, was prepared as early as 1777, but was
not reported to the General Assembly until 1779; and
not until nine years had gone by, did it become a part of
the organic law of the State. The drastic alteration
which he submitted was summed up by him in a few words:
"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any
religious worship, ministry, or place whatsoever; nor
shall he be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in
his body or his goods, nor shall he otherwise suffer, on
account of his religious opinions or belief; but all men
shall be free to profess, and by argument, to maintain
their opinions in matters of religion; and the same shall
in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."
This proposition, radical as it was at that time,
but which seems to us now to be so axiomatic in its meaning,
could only be put in practice piece by piece and step
by step, as it were, although it had the sustaining and driving
power behind it of the ablest debaters in the General
Assembly. The first step was to enact that, thereafter,
no fine should be laid on any one because he neglected to
be present at public worship; but it was not until 1779
that the clergy were divested of the right to compel the
payment of their salaries through the public treasury;

and not until 1786 that the power of the Civil Government
to regulate religious observances, and to punish the
holder of heretical or atheistic opinions, was permanently
abandoned. For the first time in Virginia a father who
refused to subscribe to all the confessions of the Episcopal
creed could claim the prerogative of guardianship over his
own children; and for the first time too a Roman Catholic
could testify in court.

Correct in principle and in action as Jefferson was in
this great controversy, he frequently, in the course of it,
expressed himself intemperately. He went so far, for
instance, as to say that the despondent view taken by so
many persons of the ability to ameliorate the condition of
mankind was due to the "depressing influence" of the
alliance between Church and State. The men who fattened
on the fruits of that alliance, he declared, would
bitterly oppose every advance of society, because they
would expect it "to unmask their usurpation and monopoly
of honors, wealth, and power, and endanger all the
comforts they now enjoyed." And to such a height did
he carry this spirit of fanatical antagonism that he refused,
while President of the United States, to proclaim
a national Day of Thanksgiving, an annual regulation as
appropriate and as desirable in his time, as it is in our
own. "I don't believe," he wrote on this occasion, "that
it is for the interest of religion for the civil magistrate to
direct its exercises, its discipline, and its doctrine. Fasting
and prayers are religious exercises; the enjoining them
an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right
to determine for itself the times for these exercises; and
the right can never be safer than in their own hands,
where the Constitution has placed it."

Jefferson was not more earnest in advocating the divorce
of Church and State than he was the separation

of the Church from the organization and administration
of every seat of learning. He had perceived the hampering
effect of that alliance on the fortunes of the College
of William and Mary at the time when he was endeavoring
to convert it into an institution of the first order for
higher education. Who were the persons that disapproved
so strongly of this change that they joined in their
efforts to prevent it? The leading Presbyterians and
Baptists, who feared the spread of the sectarian influence
which the College had always nourished. In founding
the new university, therefore, he had a double motive in
making it thoroughly undenominational: all theological
leaning in a public institution was, in his judgment, not
only grossly wrong in principle, but also invited a hostility
that would seriously diminish its popularity and
cloud its prestige.