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 be 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 mote 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 meeting-houses 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 affiliations 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 empowered 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 17'79 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.