ion. There was no safety to nations while he was permitted
to roam at large. But the putting him to death in cold blood, by
lingering tortures of mind, by vexations, insults, and deprivations, was
a degree of inhumanity to which the poisonings and assassinations of the
school of Borgia and the den of Marat never attained. The book proves,
also, that nature had denied him the moral sense, the first excellence
of well-organized man. If he could seriously and repeatedly affirm, that
he had raised himself to power without ever having committed a crime, it
proves that he wanted totally the sense of right and wrong. If he could
consider the millions of human lives which he had destroyed or caused to
be destroyed, the desolations of countries by plunderings, burnings,
and famine, the destitutions of lawful rulers of the world without the
consent of their constituents, to place his brothers and sisters on
their thrones, the cutting up of established societies of men and
jumbling them discordantly together again at his caprice, the demolition
of the fairest hopes of mankind for the recovery of their rights and
amelioration of their condition, and all the numberless train of his
other enormities; the man, I say, who could consider all these as no
crimes, must have been a moral monster, against whom every hand should
have been lifted to slay him.

You are so kind as to inquire after my health. The bone of my arm is
well knitted, but my hand and fingers are in a discouraging condition,
kept entirely useless by an oedematous swelling of slow amendment.

God bless you and continue your good health of body and mind.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLXX.--TO JOHN ADAMS, April 11, 1823

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, April 11, 1823.

Dear Sir,

The wishes expressed in your last favor, that I may continue in life and
health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of, '_Mon
Dieu! jusqu'a quand?_' would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin
in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist, which I can never be;
or rather his religion was daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false
God, he did. The being described in his five points, is not the God whom
you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent Governor of
the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable
to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious
attributes of Calvin. Indeed, I think that every Christi