and experience,
and that it is sincerely conscientious. Repeating, therefore, my just
acknowledgments for the honor proposed to me, I beg leave to add the
assurances to the society and yourself of my highest confidence and
consideration.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLXII.--TO DOCTOR BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE, June 26, 1822

TO DOCTOR BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE.

Monticello, June 26, 1822.

Dear Sir,

I have received and read with thankfulness and pleasure your
denunciation of the abuses of tobacco and wine. Yet, however sound in
its principles, I expect it will be but a sermon to the wind. You will
find it is as difficult to inculcate these sanative precepts on the
sensualities of the present day, as to convince an Athanasian that there
is but one God. I wish success to both attempts, and am happy to learn
from you that the latter, at least, is making progress, and the more
rapidly in proportion as our Platonizing Christians make more stir and
noise about it. The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the
happiness of man.

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 neighbor as thyself, is
the sum of religion. These are the great points on which he endeavored
to reform the religion of the Jews. But compare with these the
demoralizing dogmas of Calvin.

1. That there are three Gods.

2. That good works, or the love of our neighbor, are nothing.

3. That faith is everything, and the more incomprehensible the
proposition, the more merit in its faith.

4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.

5. That God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be
saved, and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes of the former
can damn them; no virtues of the latter, save.

Now, which of these is the true and charitable Christian? He who
believes and acts on the simple doctrines of Jesus; or the impious
dogmatists, as Athanasius and Calvin? Verily I say these are the false
shepherds foretold as to enter not by the door into the sheepfold, but
to climb up some other way. They are mere usurpers of the Christian
name, teaching a counter-religion made up of the deliria of crazy
imaginations, as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet. Their
blasphemies have driven thinking men into infidelity, who have too
hastily rejected the supposed author himself, with the horrors so
fals