Thomas Jefferson's Bible

In this lecture about Thomas Jefferson, part 2 of 4, Roger Weir discusses the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson. The original lecture was entitled "Jefferson's Bible: The Religion of Liberty".
 
Episode transcript - https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/transcripts/375
 
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Image credit: detail from Pastoral Landscape (1861) by Asher Brown Durand.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
We come now to a very difficult issue. They arrived
at the spot where no one dares look in our time,
m because the issues have reasserted themselves again, only this
time they have an unconscious amperage, and they have a

(00:32):
projective archetypal energy, which makes it undiscernible in terms of
human beings and only detectable in terms of mass movements.
But in Jefferson's time it was still visible in terms
of people. There were still actors upon this most precarious

(00:54):
stage of history, and Jefferson was the central player. He
became the central player, as you've come to understand, because
Benjamin Franklin had prepared the theme, it set the stage,
he'd made the costumes, he had largely written the script.

(01:14):
Jefferson recounts in his letters when they're able to be consulted.
You know, the works of Jefferson still are unpublished. The
Princeton University Press edition has gotten to seventeen ninety one,
and they were forced to stop there because the publication

(01:35):
of the seventeen nineties letters of Jefferson would literally tare
this country apart. Because Jefferson put his finger on an issue,
as I said before, which is still bothering this country.
The seventeen nineties, of course, saw the birth of political
parties in this country. What is impossible to understand is

(02:00):
that it is a religious issue, that is a spiritual issue,
that it has metaphysical shapings to it, And only in
an occult center, with a few mature minds could we
lay this issue out and turnich before our attention had

(02:23):
come to understand the incredible events that led to the
formulation of the United States, and have brought it all
back so that it is current again. Jefferson, in his letters,
recounts that when he accepted George Washington's appointment to be

(02:43):
the first Secretary of State, he had just come back
from five years in France. He had supposed that he
was going to at last again retire to Monticello, but
the pressing demands of Washington for balnce in his administration
convinced Jefferson that he was in fact a necessary figure. Washington,

(03:08):
of course, under the tremendous gun of responsibility that had
been engendered in the Constitutional Convention. You may recall that
the Constitutional Convention was authorized in its delegations to amend
the Articles of Confederation, which had largely been drawn up

(03:31):
in the revolutionary period under the aegis of Franklin and Jefferson,
the Declaration of Independence. Most of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence were not at the Constitutional Convention. Of
the fifty six men who signed the Declaration of Independence,
only for signed the Constitution, and one of those four,

(03:53):
Franklin says specifically for the other two Pennsylvania delegates, beside
himself self, the only reason we're signing is that we
have to have something to work with, and the faults
of this document will be so glaring that our countrymen

(04:13):
will soon rectify the scene. The Constitutional Convention usurped its
authority and drew up the Constitution from a power group standpoint,
who were to be known as the Federalists, who were
energized by a thirty year old New York lawyer named

(04:36):
Alexander Hamilton. And all this happened when Jefferson was in
France and Franklin was ill in Philadelphia, and Washington, because
of his integrity, realized that he was on the hot seat.
All of the power groups that had a voice had

(04:59):
given up the revolution and had gone back, leaning towards
a monarchy, with Washington to be the king and Washington,
too good a soldier, having fought too long and having
understood too well what the revolutionary were was fought for,

(05:21):
refused to take the bit, and instead, as a manly warrior,
as a general, as a great rock upon which someone
made found trust, Washington sought to bring all of the
parties out in the open and let them resolve themselves

(05:42):
in the only controllable arena that was left to his jurisdiction,
the only battlefield where he could still command, and that
was in his cabinet. And so Washington's first cabinet was significant.
It was a symbolic arrangement of individuals representing all the

(06:03):
major power groups, and in order to balance the Secretary
of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Washington told Jefferson, I need you,
The country needs you. You must be represented here. And so,
on his way to take office, Jefferson stopped to see
the old eighty four year old Benjamin Franklin, just a

(06:26):
few weeks before he died, like a master navigator, checking
in with the old pilot, and Jefferson recounts in one
of his letters how the old ailing Franklin motioned over
to his table, and he said to Jefferson there was

(06:46):
a sheaf of papers there, please uh fetch them, And
Jefferson recounts how he came over to the bed and
of the young gr and son, William Botch of Franklin,
was there, and he looked through the manuscript, just uh
paging through, and he saw it was a number of chiefs,

(07:10):
almost a large quartel chief's and it was a complete
account Franklin's personal handwriting account of the last power struggle
in the negotiations with the British Empire. And Jefferson looked
to Franklin, and Franklin said keep it. And Jefferson said,

(07:32):
I'll be glad to read it, and I'll return it
to you, and Franklin said keep it, and Jefferson the
third time said, well, when I finish reading it, I'll
make sure that it's cared for and sent back to you.
And Franklin again said you keep it. He went to
the cabinet post and the news came that Franklin had died.

(07:58):
So Jefferson recounts in the letter or how he sent
for William Temple Franklin, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who
has made his executive error and Jefferson handed over the manuscript,
and when he did, he had this clear vision that
he had done something wrong, and he said the grandson,

(08:19):
William temple Bock, just folded it as if it were
scraps of paper and stuffed it in his pocket, said
he would take care of it. And Jefferson said that
the feeling that something was wrong, the casualness of the
way the manuscript was treated, and he realized that Franklin
had meant for him personally to guard this insight, to

(08:43):
guard this history, to take care of this but time
of the meaningfulness. The central ritual mystery of the revolution
was that the British Empire did not think that it
had lost the Revolutionary War, but that right round one
was over and they would win it all back again.

(09:06):
And Jefferson realized, as the years went on and the
decades went on, and it remained unpublished, along with all
of Franklin's other works remained unpublished, that the British had
bought off the grandson, which they had. They paid him
seven thousand pounds sterling just to do nothing. Take your

(09:28):
time editing the papers. No one will say anything. There
are a lot of papers. That's how they talked to you,
take your time, and towards the end of your life
put out a nice homie selection. Make Franklin sort of
a sort of a homey fellow with an eye for
the ladies. But don't let anyone see how important he was.

(09:53):
He was the man of the century. He was the revolutionary.
He was the one who said, we have to open
up the structural nature of man's mind. The time has come.
We've had great individuals in history. Now it's time to
have a nation of individuals who are free liberty. Not

(10:17):
free to just walk around through the forest, but free
in the sense of opening up the mind to see
nature for what it was, to see the divinity for
what it was, to see man for what it was,
and with that directness, with the confidence of an accurate image,

(10:37):
base then to decide what they would do. And Franklin
constantly was saying, we don't know what man will do,
because we have never had a society of free men. Well,
we've had aristocracies, we've had holagarchis, we've never had a
society of free men, generation after generation of freemen. We

(11:02):
don't know what they'll do. And the only thing we
can do is create conditions that will work for them
in whatever way they want. Jefferson was the only individual
who understood that message that life meaning from Benjamin Franklin
in a comprehensive way. The vision had passed on in

(11:25):
a very real way. Benjamin Franklin was the Merland and
Thomas Jefferson was King Arthur, and Jefferson raised around him
a round table of individuals with integrity who would not buckle.
James Madison, Monroe, the old Revolutionaries, Elbridge, Gary, Edward Rutledge,

(11:50):
a number of them. But he was the only one
who had any power, because the power had been totally usurped,
sopped up, put in the pocket in the back rooms
of the Constitutional Convention and afterwards. And the key to

(12:12):
it was to translate the medium of action into money,
and to make a national bank the guarantee of the
valuation of that money, and to keep control of the
national bank and thereby the monetary supply in the hands

(12:33):
of a political few, the Federalists party. And as long
as that obtained, then one could keep one's handle on
the spigot of activity, because whatever was being done then
was done this way, and the only threat, the only
possible angle from where that control, that power move could

(12:58):
be jeopardized were from the people themselves, from the rights
of the people, and so the rights of the people
had to be translated into law, into legalities. And if
one controlled the legal mind and the monetary nature of action,

(13:23):
then one was secure upon the throw. And so a
tyranny of lawyers and a tyranny of bankers came together
and braided itself together in the seventeen nineties, and it
looked like it was all over because it was fought
to complete. They had control. But Jefferson was a champion.

(13:50):
Jefferson was like Franklin. He was the greatest mind of
his time, and considering the massive profundity of the problem,
realizing that one cannot tackle it piece by piece, bit
by debt, issue by issue, like a master strategist, he

(14:13):
looked for the navel in the issue, where, in fact,
in human experience, in human capacity, does all this come
to bear. Where is the place in the structure where
there's a center. Any system has to have a center,

(14:33):
and that's the only attackable, workable battlefield. And he found
that the center of that federalist dream and empire was Christianity.
It was an idea of Christianity more than Christianity itself.

(14:55):
And so Jefferson mooted to himself a way to open
up this entire issue of the national tyranny that was
in the making, the usurpation of power by the moneyed
few lawyers, and how to return the country back to

(15:18):
the people. And the core of it was to understand
the nature of Christianity, to take away the Roman Empire
element out of Christianity and restore Christianity back to its
prime orginal It's used to be called primitive Christianity, but

(15:40):
its prime orginal nature, in its prime orgial nature, was
that there is a direct link between the individual person
and the God Him, that there is no necessary structure
in between the individual and the God Him, that the
Lord of hoo Us and the individual person can have

(16:03):
direct single contact without any go between, without any structure
or system in between themselves. And Jefferson, mooting this over
and over again, realized that this somehow was the core.
And it took him a long time to find the
handle on their sword, because it was buried in the

(16:27):
stone of ignorance, like it always is. He wrote in
Notes on the State of Virginia seventeen eighty seven seventeen
eighty seven. Well, that's when the Constitution Convention was He wrote,
all the powers of government, legislative, executive, in judiciary result

(16:53):
to the legislative body, the concentrating these in the same
hands as precisely the deaf and of despotic government. It
will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised
by a plurality of hands, and not by a single
one one hundred and seventy three despots will surely be

(17:14):
as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn
their eyes in the Republic of Venice. As little will
it avail us that they are chosen by ourselves. An
elect of despotism was not the government we fought for,
but one which should not only be founded on free principles,
but in which the powers of government should be so

(17:36):
divided and balanced among several bodies of magistry as that
no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually
checked and restrained by the others. He said for this
reason that convention which passed the Ordinance of Government, laid
its foundation on this basis, that the legislative, executive and

(17:57):
judiciary department should be separate and distinct, so that no
person should exercise the powers of more than one of
them at the same time. But no barrier was provided
between these several powers. The judiciary and executive members were
left dependent on the legislative for their subsistence in office,

(18:19):
and some of them for their continuance in it. And
then he went on to write, quoting Caesar, that eventually
they will figure out the pattern. Men want power, they
will have it. They will figure it out. What is
this pattern that they will come to understand. Finally, then

(18:44):
he quotes Caesar. With money, we will get men, said Caesar.
And with men, we will get money. That's how the
Roman Empire began. That's why they killed Caesar, because he
figured out the key to the whole issue. If you

(19:04):
tilt everyone on each other by their own natural greed,
and keep that tilt tilted by fear, everything works magically.
Jefferson wrote, Nor should our assembly be diluted by the
integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited

(19:27):
powers will never be abused because themselves are not disposed
to abuse them. They should look forward to a time,
and that not a distant one, when a corruption in
this as in the country from which we derive our origin,
will have seized the head of government and be spread

(19:47):
by them through the body of the people. When they
will purchase the voices of the people and make them
pay the price. Does that sound like put the phone
come please? Do we need this equipment to serve you better?
Therefore raising your thieves so we can have the equipment

(20:08):
to serve you better? Pay up well now. When all
of your banking and all of your shopping and everything
is done by phone, which will be keyed into in
the next decade, if you don't pay your phone bill,
you won't be able to do anything. William Jefferson said,
when they will purchase the voices of the people and

(20:29):
make them pay the price. Human nature is the same
on every side of the Atlantics, and will be alike
influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against
corruption and tyranny is before they have gotten hold of us.
It is better to keep the wolf out of the
fold than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws

(20:52):
after he shall have injured. This was his reply to
the Constitutional Convention, saying they have got the power show
all set up, and I'm over here and Franklin is ill,
and all the rest of us were out in our

(21:12):
several states and countrysides and cities. And this group drew
up a document giving themselves carte blanche, and now we
have to go through with it. Now we are chipped.
When Jefferson entered into the cabinet and became a positive,

(21:33):
Alexander Hamilton Washington was forced to become neutral. He was
forced not to taste those because it was a real
dynamite situation. A man named Daniel Shea had found sheriffs

(21:54):
at his door because he couldn't pay taxes that have
been assessed again his business. They do just what the
sheriff's deputies do. Now. You know, if you owe some
money to someone you don't pay up, they can get
a court order to get The sheriffs come and they
put a lock and all your assets and you have

(22:16):
to pay before they unlock it. And they stand there
with guns. Well, Daniel say two hundred years ago, said
no died, and he went and got his neighbors and friends.
When they got down their old minute men long rifles,
and they said, we have fought the parents before over taxation,
and we'll fight them again because you may have changed

(22:39):
your uniforms and your so called nationality. But you are
the same people. You're doing the same thing. And Shay's
rebellion scared. I think the word at that time was
be Jesus out of them, because the next time a
group tried to pull this kind of a protest, Washington

(23:01):
sent twelve thousand armed men with cannons because the entire
system was going to be jeopardized. So Washington had to
remain neutral because they were walking on a powder ken,
and he realized that he could not take the leadership
role on any side. He had to maintain himself in

(23:25):
a neutral background in order to maintain some kind of
a context wherein this issue could be fought out by
words instead of guns. Because the nation could not the
new nation nation could not stand a civil war as
a counter revolutionary adjunct to the American Revolution. Oh yeah,

(23:50):
every time there's a revolution, three or four years later,
there's a counter revolution. In a weird way, the civil
war was put off for years, the inevitable civil war
that follow of the American Revolution. And that's why when
Lincoln was trying to hold the country together, he had

(24:10):
to conceive of the vision of what what is this government?
And if you go back to the Gettysburgs of Dress,
he doesn't talk about the constitution. He talks about the people.
But the structure is of foreign by the people, and
that's what it is is. Our legal entity is not

(24:33):
a monetary investment. There is a life force of freedom
for the very people who exist, and that takes metaphysical
penetration of vision or to see that through all of
the mess. And for Jefferson, he was there at the
beginning and he saw the steam and the smoke starting

(24:56):
to rise, and he realized, we have to do something
now in order to straighten we will never get it right.
And all through the seventeen nineties, the goad in the
background was that the French had tried to imitate the
Americans in their revolution, but they hadn't done the one
necessary thing. They hadn't prepared the people for independence, for freedom.

(25:22):
And when the people got powered, they were still the
slobs that they had been in drunken, bitter, cynical reaction
to the thumb of the courtly power for centuries. And
so they acted like slobs and brought on Napoleon. Because

(25:43):
by the time two or three years of this went on,
everybody was ready to have anybody who could order the situation,
and Napoleon simply took the situation in hand. And if
you didn't cooperate, you were dead. And if you did cooperate,

(26:03):
you were there to serve and expand the dream of
the Emperor. All during the seventeen nineties, this French static
was clouding the American issue, and so Jefferson, trying to
find that center of the pattern that was workable, found
the religious issue. His power of vision, his penetrating capacity

(26:28):
to see the navel of human activity. And at the
core of that was Christianity, and at the core of
that was Jesus. And so Jefferson had to come face
to face with the issue of Jesus Christ, and that

(26:50):
took him a long time to understand. One of the
major figures that helped him out in this was Joseph Priestley.
If you're at all scientifically educated, you know Joseph Priestley
is the discoverer of oxygen. He was one of the
first great chemists, the first man ever separated an element,

(27:12):
a basic building block of nature of reality. If you're
religiously educated, you know him as one of the earliest
Unitarian ministers in England very famous. His histories of Christianity
were the de mith mystified Christianity, the true history of
the Church without the corruption. So forth. In seventeen ninety one,

(27:40):
the mobs attack Priestley's house, Manchester. Priestley was a fine
individual approaching sixty used to have meetings with the Lunar Society,
people like James Watt, Matthew Bolton, all the makers of
the industrial Revolution in England together in Manchester and weekends

(28:02):
just like Franklin's Hunta, because they patterned themselves at Franklin's HUTA,
because David Hartley and Joseph Priestley were all correspondents of Franklin.
Franklin had raised the English group just like he'd raised
the French group, just like he'd raised the American group.
He was a great grand pappy of this whole international

(28:23):
entourage of men who had opened up their minds to
understand with each other what is this world that we
live in? What what are we? What are we doing?
The Lunar Society celebrated Bastille Day July fourteenth, seventeen ninety one,
and the mobs of the workers, incited by those in

(28:46):
power industrially and politically in Manchester said these guys are
anti Christian, and they burned Priestley's house downs. They burned
all of his library, they destroyed all of the scientific equipment.
Priestley escaped with his life to London, and he realized
that he was still endangered, and so following his three sons,
he moved to Pennsylvania. He moved to where the two

(29:10):
branches of the Susquehanna River come together and form the
main river that goes down to Philadelphia north up in
the foothills of the Appalachians. It's the national monument in
the United States. Priestley's house. It was Priestley who was
the living bridge, the living contact that helped Jefferson focus

(29:31):
and resolve this tremendous religious problem that he had, which
was also the problem of the nation, which was focused
on the figure of Jesus. And was Priestley's writings that
helped Jefferson find enough perspectus so that he could bring
his tremendous capacity to bear. And when he did, he

(29:53):
found the core of the situation. He found the plug
that held this whole federal this empire, British Empire, Roman
Empire system together and he pulled the plug, and he
pulled the plug in eighteen hundred and that's when he
became President of the United States. And Jefferson set to

(30:16):
work right away to return the country to the people.
The first thing he did before he abolished income taxes,
because income taxes are one of the necessary struts in
this fiction. It makes the monetary hold have teeth. Without it,

(30:40):
it doesn't really have teeth. But before he abolished income
taxes and balanced the budget and got rid of the
national debt. That's what Jefferson did in his first administration.
But before that, even he wrote a beautiful letter to
Joseph Priestley, and he said, I think I have the
letter here. I think I have a letter here, Joseph

(31:03):
Priestley from Washington, DC, March twenty first. That's the Vernal
Equinum eighteen o one. Jefferson had just taken office about
six weeks before. To doctor Joseph Priestley, Dear sir, I
learned some time ago that you were in Philadelphia, but

(31:24):
it was only for a fortnight, and I supposed you
were gone. It was not till yesterday I received information
that you were still there. Had been very very ill,
but were on the recovery. I sincerely rejoiced that you
are so. Yours is one of the few lives precious
to mankind, and for the continuance of which every thinking

(31:46):
man is solicitous. Bigots may be an exception, what an effort,
my dear sir, of bigotry in politics and religion, we
have gone through. This is at the end of the
seventeen nineties. This is an eighteen o one, when Jefferson
had won. The man was so scarred emotionally that, uh,

(32:08):
the Federalists thought, in one last gas, we'll we'll, we'll
cripple the son of the Dome. So they'd tried a
smear campaign against Jefferson's morality, and that's when all the
charges came out that he was sleeping with black slaves
and fathering children by them and everything. The truth is

(32:33):
is that the black slave he was accused of sleeping
with was actually a child by his wife's father, John
Wales w A. Y L. E. S. John Wales lost
his third wife to smallpox. They crushed him and he

(32:54):
took solace with the slave who was half white. Her
name was Betty Hemmings. Her father had been Captain Hemmings.
And so the children of John Wales and Betty Hemmings
were three quarters white. And the last child there were
six of them, was called Sally Sally Hemmings. She was

(33:19):
actually the half sister of Jefferson's wife, and when Jefferson's
wife died, she made him promise not to ever set
another woman over their children, that is, don't get married again,
and take care of my family. And so Jefferson took
care of those black slaves, the Hemmings is that they

(33:42):
were part of his family because they were. But Jefferson
would never in his lifetime reveal the true issue. And
in eighteen o two the Federalists Tory group hired the
perfect kind of yellow journalist backed by their a man
named Colander, and he started all this smear campaign. Jefferson,

(34:07):
religious man. Look at this, Look at this, look at this.
Jefferson says to Priestley, what an effort, my dear sir,
of bigotry and politics and religion that we have gone through.
The barbarians really flattered themselves that they should be able

(34:28):
to bring back the times of vandalism when ignorance put
everything into the hands of power, and Priestcraft all advances
in science were proscribed as innovations. Proscribed means sentenced determination.
When you proscribed, your l name is put on the

(34:49):
list to be killed. All scientific developments were going to
be halted. Their innovations, we don't need them. They disturbed
the system. You see, this was the era not only
the birth of the United States, but the birth of science,
the birth of technology in an applied way called industry

(35:10):
as opposed to industrial which is owned by somebody who's
making money, but industry in the sense of applied effort
for the benefit of all. All of this came together
at the same time. All this was being born at
the same time. And there wasn't any other country in
the world where the birth of liberty was successfully maneuvered

(35:34):
through this tremendous era except in the United States. Because
Jefferson was at the whale. He wouldn't give up. He
learned from the old master Ben Franklin. Remember that time
that Franklin stood alone next to the fireplace with all
the lords of the British Empire calling him every name

(35:57):
in the book. Franklin, I'm not changing expression, taking it all,
taking it all for hours on in because he wasn't
there to react as an individual. He was there as
the pilot of the ship. Estate. We're gonna have a
free people. We're gonna have a country of millions of

(36:18):
free people, and there's nothing they can say or do.
It's gonna stop it. Franklin, in one letter to a
British friend who was pro empire, said, look at all
this activity that you've gone through in Concord and Electington.

(36:39):
You've killed a hundred and fifty the Yankees the cost
of twenty thousand pounds ahead, and in that time period,
sixty thousand people have been born in this country. If
you just use your reason, man, it's an ebit of all.
Jefferson sent the same kind of methods to Napoleon through

(37:00):
James Monroe. He said, tell him yourself, tell him directly,
tell him from me. In French, we took a survey
and you have thirty thousand people of French descent on
the North American continent, and we're sending forty five thousand
a month through the Cumberland Gap. And if you wanna fight,

(37:22):
you're gonna be completely outmanned. They understood vision and structure.
This is what they talked about when they talked about
enlightenment and rationality, that not only does the world make sense,
but man makes sense, and that all of it is
in the concord. It's in a harmony, and the only

(37:44):
thing that an individual has to do to protect it
is to keep that our oudor of harmony flowing in
his visionary capacity. Because man has a natural religious sense.
We call it blue morality, but it's very deep. Morality
is actually the way in which God's natural law works

(38:06):
in man. And you don't need any priest's craft to
tell you. You don't need any rituals to refine it,
but you do need to be educated to be yourself
because censuries and millenniums of blindness and ignorance have crippled
man so much that he needs a little help standing
up for the first generation or two. But then all

(38:29):
of the crutches that have helped him stand up have
to be taken away, because there'll come a time when
there are generations that are born free and they won't
need to be propped up, and then all these crutches
are gonna get in their way, and so government has
to be prepared to change its tomb at a certain
time and get out of the people's way, because they're

(38:52):
going to go where we can't even envision. That's when
Jefferson said, you know, every nineteen years, we should desire
the whole structure of government and let those people at
that time reconstitute in whatever way suits them best. They'll
be practical about it. They're gonna want to live, they're
gonna want to take care of their kids and each other.

(39:13):
They won't go too far away. But if they keep
doing this, eventually the tenth or twentieth or a hundredth
time down the line, they're gonna get very wise about
self government. They're gonna do it right. Eventually, they'll learn
to do it right. W but we have to provide
for them at this crucial juncture because they're learning to

(39:35):
leave the nursery and they can't crawl out into the
world of freedom. They have to stand up like men
and walk out on their own. And that's what we're doing,
he said, again and again. He said to Priestley eighteen
o one, he'd just taken office as the president of

(39:55):
the United States. They pretended to praise and encourage education,
but it was to be the education of our ancestors.
We were to look backwards, not forwards for improvement, the
President himself declaring in one of his answers to addresses
that we were never to expect to go beyond them

(40:16):
in real science, our ancestors. This was the real ground
of all the attacks on you. Remember they had burned
Priestley's home in England. This was the real ground of
all the attacks on you. It wasn't just that you
were uh a scientist who doesn't uh believe the Church

(40:39):
doctrine to a t. It's that, man, you were a
threat because you're looking at the core of what holds
this illusion together, this delusion together, and if we wake
up to that, that whole structure is gonna collapse. Jefferson

(41:00):
and saying, those who live by mystery and Charlatan read
fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy,
the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted system that
ever shown on man. Endeavor to crush your well earned
and well deserved fame. But with the Liliputians upon Gulliger,

(41:23):
our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art
and the industry had thrown them. Science and honesty are
replaced on their high ground, and you, my dear sir,
as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is
with heartfelt satisfaction that in the first moments of my
public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land,

(41:47):
tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem,
cover you under the protection of those laws which were
made for the wise and good like you, in disdain
the legitimacy of that liable on the legislation, which, under
the form of a law, was for some time placed
among them. As the form is now subsiding and the

(42:08):
horizon becoming serene, it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon
with attention. We can no longer say that there is
nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in
the history of man is new. The great extent of
our republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The
mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it

(42:31):
is new. But the most pleasing novelty is its so
quietly subsiding over such an extent of surface to its
true level. Again, the order in good sense displayed in
this recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which
lately arose, really bestraet bepeaks a strength of character in

(42:53):
our nation, which augurs well for the duration of our republic,
and now a much better satisfied now of its stability
than I was before it was tried. I have been,
above all things followed by the prospect which opened honors
in the event of a non election of a president.
And if you remember that, the election of eighteen hundreds

(43:16):
was a complete logger him because of the constitutional power
the Act go because it could be manipulated. Oh yeah,
the Constitution for min manipulation of power. Because it could
be manipulated. The election of eighteen hundreds was thrown into
the House of Representatives and for days and weeks on

(43:41):
end they were unable to resolve the election. And finally,
on the thirty sixth ballot, Jefferson was elected third president.
The man who was on the other side, who was
vice President, was Aaron Burr, And Aaron Burr was very
like Bene mc donald, one of the archetyptal traders in

(44:03):
American history. Because of power play, had only put competition
to mister Jefferson, but had infiltrated his whole situation with
someone like there s. He writes how wonderfully we had
come out of this. But then he writes scriefly, there
is something that you can do, not just for me,

(44:27):
but for this country, and not just for this country,
but for the new men and women who are coming out.
You can write for us an accurate history of Christianity
without the church structure. Let us see exactly who Jesus was.

(44:49):
Let us who exactly what at the core of Christianity,
the true morality that he taught what, And you're the
man to do it. You have all the research which
they had written, a beautiful history in four volumes of
Christianity up to the fall of the Western Empire that

(45:10):
as he filled in the period that UH came at
the beginning of Gibbons history before in UH the Fall
of Home in four ten AD, he had just written
a wonderful little book that compared Socrates and Dus which
Jefferson had written the coach going back UH to Washington, Dad,

(45:37):
you're the man to do it, and then priefly do
He died the next year on Jefferson has hung out
on a way because he had just seen the vision
of what was necessary, what was needed, and the very
man that he had chosen was now gone. And in

(46:00):
this turmoil, Jefferson realized again, like the sort of cosmic
cure that he was, that he's gonna have to do
it himself. So he brought all the maturely cut he
was in the White House, he was trying to revivify
the whole country. And in between all those acts, alone
at night, bringing the midnight well, Jefferson put together the

(46:26):
Philosophy of Jesus, the demystified essential moral code that was
at the core of the Christian teachings. Without the church,
no priests, no church structure, no committees of council throughout

(46:46):
the ages, none of it. There's a simple, direct code
of morality which the individual could rely upon to be
trustworthy towards them felt well and towards others, whether it
was a simple act of personal decision or a grant

(47:07):
coming together of four or five million individuals to make
a country. And in eighteen o four Jefferson put together
the Philosophy of Jesus the Low pamphlet. It's been very
difficult to get a hold of it, and in fact

(47:31):
it was largely confuwed by most historians until eighteen fifty eight.
Men named Herman Randall, who did the earliest great life
of Jefferson in three volumes in eighteen fifty eight, discovered
that there had been two distinct book that Jefferson had

(47:52):
put together. The one was in eighteen o three eighteen
o four, which was The Philosophy of Jesus, and then
an eighteen twenty y're in his retirement, in his old age,
he put together The Life and Morals of Jesus, and
it's the second book that publishes the Jefferson Bible. But
both of them are published together finally just last year

(48:13):
by Princeton University Press called Jefferson's Extracts from the Gobel.
And what Jefferson was doing in these books was putting
his visionary figure on exactly the place the focus in
the mentality of Western Man and in the history of
Western Man, where the force of empire is turned round

(48:39):
and left free, so that it becomes a code of
personal morality for the individual and prepares in them for
the liberty of vision, which alone permits self government. Well,
let's take a break and we'll come back after that
and look at these books. If you can bring yourselves

(49:03):
and your your mind the back into my high focus
here I don't mean it to to be high. And
these issues are appoignant. What is they? What is they buy?

(49:27):
The cruct the changes religion from a personal experience to
a church institution, What takes it out of the hands
of a person and puts it into the designs of abtructure,

(49:48):
a church an empire. In Christianity, the issue is the Trinity,
because assume as you you have a conception of the Trinity,
you have to understand it. In order to understand that structure,

(50:09):
you have to have a theology, and in order to
support and mature theology, you have to have a theocratic
history and a church structure. And the whole thing devolves
on that.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Oddly enough, strangely enough, Jefferson was such an old revolutionary
fighter and he went for the drug van that the
issue is it that we have to see Jesus as
a man and not as a theological creation.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
That if we have to take a sibers to our Bibles,
let's do it. Let's cut out all of the theocratic embellishment.
Let's get down to what was said. Let's get down

(51:07):
to just a the word. Alright, we have a problem
with translation, alright, we have a problem with translation. My
friend Joseph priestly read Hebrews since he was a teenager.
He also read Chaldean. In his Koliac, he read Arabic

(51:31):
and Greek, the sort of oxygen was an intellectual. He
spoke about a dozen languages, all the languages of Europe
and all the ancient languages. He read all the extent
fragments as well as the translation, and he laid him
now the best he could. And Jefferson took them under
his arm, and in the White House late at night,

(51:54):
put it together, knowing the volume that he did in
eighteen twenty. In order to make it as road as possible,
you put the greet in Latin and French and English
all together across the page, inviting the individual. You make

(52:19):
up your own mind. If you think the English text
has been tampered with, here's the Greek text, here's the
Latin text, here's the French text. But if you put
them all together, with all these different languages, you can
begin to get the gist for yourself. The GISTs, the gist,

(52:43):
the focus of Jesus is not in some theocratic structure,
but in the person. That's all right too, but it's personal,
it's direct it's individual and all anyone else can do
is give you information, widen your database, simplify or sophisticate

(53:07):
your image base. But you have to make the decisions.
You have to put it together. And if you give
up this right, that right transmits itself into the hands
of others as power. And that's how rights lose their

(53:29):
liberty and become power for others. Because it's such an
important nexus. It's really at the core of everything. And
if someone controls all those rights transmitted into power, that's

(53:49):
like the dictatorship of the empires. And that's exactly what
we're fighting against. That's exactly it. He wrote a letter
to Madison in eighteen twenty six. Jefferson was at the
end of his life. He would die April second, eighteen

(54:10):
twenty six. He was eighty four years in old eighty
three Monticello, February seventeenth, eighteen twenty six. This is a
quarter of a century after that letter to Justin Priestley.
He's been busy all that time. Can you imagine that

(54:30):
all that time he writes to Madison about the University
of Virginia that they're just setting up. He's designed it,
he's architecturally designed the buildings. He's intellectually designed the library.
He made the list for the books and bought the
books and put them in there. They were designing the syllabus.

(54:56):
And he's saying to Madison, we have to watch out
now in the selection of our law professor, because of
all the professions in this country, the one most easily
tempted to usurp rights into power are the lawyers, because

(55:18):
eventually it's going to be a judicial tyranny that breaks
the back of the republic. In our selection of our
law professor, we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles.
He's writing to Madison, Jefferson, you're not talking about what

(55:39):
party does he belong to. They're not talking about that
level at all. They're talking about cosmic ultimates. They're talking
about the enlightened human being who is open to the
natural cosmos in a direct personal way and has a
scientific outlook and rational equanimity to check himself all the

(56:02):
time in a moral sense, to do it right. Eternal
vigilance is the price of liberty. It's the price of it,
not the monetary price. It's the insurance of its reality.
He writes, you will recollect that before the Revolution, coke

(56:24):
Lyttleton was the universal elementary book of law students. You
remember also that our laws were then all Whigs in
the sense of being committed to the rational enlightenment of
all men. But when his black letter text and uncouth
but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honeyed

(56:47):
mansfield Ism of Blackstone. These are British Empire legal minds, Mansfield,
Blackstone and so forth. They're the ones who conceived of
the legalism that justified the British Empire. Because in the
eighteenth century the British Empire was very, very very strong,

(57:07):
but in the nineteenth century it dominated the world. The
map of the British Empire in nineteen hundred span the
whole world. Jefferson sang to medicine. Remember remember he said,
it used to be that the lawyers when we were
in the Revolution had open minds and they were committed

(57:30):
to helping their fellow man. Now everything has changed, he said,
from that moment that profession began to slide into Toryism.
And nearly all the young brute of lawyers now are
of that hue. They're all towards beefing up the system

(57:51):
because the system is going to make them money. I mean,
with money, they can ensure the control of the system.
We suppose themselves indeed to be enlightened, because they no
longer know what enlightenment or republicanism means. It is in
our seminary uses the religious term for a university. It's

(58:14):
in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be
kept alive the real secret tradition of liberty, the structure
of the mind that can envision liberty accurately, and the
quality of moral character that can produce it in the world.

(58:37):
So this vestal flame is to be kept alive. It
is thence from the University of Virginia. It's the only
place we can really protect for a while. Now, thence
is to spread anew over our own and sister states.
If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within
a dozen or twenty years, a majority of our own

(58:57):
legislature will be from one school, and many disciples will
have carried its doctrines home with them to their several states,
and we will have thus leavened the whole mass of ignorance.
This is to Madison in eighteen twenty six. The difficulty
was that that movement became truncated. It just started. And

(59:22):
a few years later Andrew Jackson got into the White House.
And Andrew Jackson was a back woodsman, an unsophisticate, an
honest man. But the critics of him said he rode
his horse into the White House and in the inaugural

(59:44):
parade there were no persons of power. There were the
blacks who were freed, there were the back woodsmen with
their coonskin cats. All of the American people helped themselves.
They all walked into the the White House and had
a party in start eating all the food. And Jackson said,
that's right, because the White House belongs to the people.

(01:00:07):
When the oil lamps burned in the back rooms and
they said, this looks to us like the French Revolution
is coming here. We gotta do something about them. We've
got to stop this. And then Jackson was the last
Republican president until the whole Republican idea vision was recast.

(01:00:32):
It was recast in the eighteen fifties and the first
candidate they put forth was John C. Fremont, which Californians
remember from their history, and he lost to Buchanada in
eighteen fifty six. But their second candidate Abraham Lincoln won
because the situation had gotten out of hand and only
somebody with primal vision could have held it together, because

(01:00:56):
the recast Republicans were the ones who had the vision
of why are we doing this? Why is anything here
at all? Where did all this come from? What really
was the story? And most importantly, what qualities of humanity
and morality and intelligence do we have to have to

(01:01:16):
entertain that vision in a realistic way and to apply
it to our lives and make it come to be.
That's why Lincoln is so great, because he brought the
Jeffersonian vision back. Is it? This is why? Not for control?
That's not the issue. It's not North against South, it's

(01:01:38):
not industrial against planters. In fact, the Civil Wars between
two power faction groups, the North and the South. Both
were power faction groups, one based on Northern industry and
the one based on Southern industry. But the losers were
going to be the American people. So he said, the

(01:02:00):
Civil War is being fought for the American people, not
for the victory of any power group. And because Lincoln
held that vision tenaciously would not let it go. He's
like Jefferson. He was a monumental hero. You couldn't have
picked a bagawood geta warrior any better for the time
and place than Jefferson or Lincoln. He wouldn't let go,

(01:02:23):
and so Lincoln was killed when the Civil War was
seen to be coming to a close, so that he
wouldn't reconstruct the country along those pristine visionary lines. Well,
they called it reconstruction, the reconstruction of the carpetbaggers. Our
power group won and your power group lost, is the

(01:02:46):
way that they talked at that time. And of course
that Hubree's that pride led directly to Theodore Roosevelt. Carry
a big stick. Now the Philippines are ours, Cuba is ours.

(01:03:09):
Maybe when we get big enough, I will take Ireland back.
That's that's what was happening. All this is nascent here
with Jefferson, because he understood two weeks before Jefferson died,
less than that ten days before he died. The last

(01:03:31):
letter that Jefferson ever wrote June twenty fourth, eighteen twenty six,
to a friend named Roger Weiman. He was a chairman
of the uh Independence Day celebration was going to be
fifty years to the day, and he wrote to Jefferson
can you come to the celebration? I mean, who are

(01:03:51):
who should be at the celebration but to you? But
Jefferson was was ill. You know what he had yet
chronic diarrhea. He had drank mineral water all his life
from white sulfur springs, West Virginia, and his system had
become leeched out by the excessive minerals in the mineral water.

(01:04:14):
And he died of chronic diarrhea. He couldn't keep anything down.
That's how he died. So he wrote to Whitesman, respected, sir,
the kind invitation I received from you on the part
of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be
present with them at their celebration the old Revolutionary. He

(01:04:36):
never let go of it. It's the country belongs to
the people. The celebration is their celebration, as one of
the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own
and the fate of the world. It's plattering to myself,

(01:04:57):
and it's heightened by the honorable accompaniment proposed for the
comfort of such a journey. It adds sensibly to the
sufferings of sickness to be deprived by it of a
personal participation in the rejoicings of that day. But acquiescence
is a duty under circumstances not placed among those we

(01:05:18):
are permitted to control. I should, indeed, with peculiar delight,
have met and exchange their congratulations personally with the small
band the remnant of that host of worthies who joined
with us on that day in the bold and doubtful
election we were to make for our country between submission
or the sword, and have enjoyed with them the consolatory

(01:05:42):
fact that our fellow citizens, after half a century of
experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.
May it be to the world that I believe it
will be to some parts sooner, to others later, but
finally to all, to the whole world, the signal of

(01:06:02):
arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance
and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves. No one
ever tyrannizes us without our permission. That form which we
have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise

(01:06:24):
of reason and freedom of thought. All eyes are opened
or opening to the rights of man. The general spread
of the light of science has already laid open to
every view, the palpable truth that the massive mankind has
not been born with saddles on their backs. No Ah

(01:06:47):
favored few, born booted and spurred, ready to ride them
legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds of
hope for others, for ourselves. Let the annual return of
this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights in
an undiminished devotion to them. And of course he goes

(01:07:09):
on to thank him again for the invitation. The core,
the key, the trigger where tyranny locks us in to
the whole response syndrome is by inducing us to give
up our personal contact with Divinity and to say that

(01:07:30):
it has to be mediated through some structure, that it
has to be theologically informed and refined and ritualized, and
that all of this is necessary for our own good.
And therefore we have to put this control into the
hands of others who are experts, who are specialists, who

(01:07:51):
are professionals, and they're going to take good care of
us as long as we trust them to do it.
For Jefferson, when he put together The Philosophy of Jesus,
he realized Priestley's book comparing Socrates and Jesus, the best

(01:08:13):
of the classical world, the best of the religious insight.
The Socrates was excellent in his kind, but he taught
an elite few. He taught the young men of Athens,
the wealthy young men who could afford the time and

(01:08:34):
had the intelligence, had the intellect to go through the
Socratic dialogues with him. It was elitist, if not in
terms of money and position, certainly in terms of intelligence.
But Jesus as a person, talked to everybody. Everybody. Doesn't

(01:08:58):
matter whether you understand some theol argument doesn't interfere with
your god given right to distinguish between good and evil
for yourself. As long as you're not diluted, any human
being can do it. And so Jefferson attacked the trinitarian

(01:09:18):
position as a subtle way by which Theocratic structure was
induced in between man and his contact with the divine.
You have to figure it out. It's not self evident.
If you put three dots up standing for the three
persons of the Trinity, and then put a circle around

(01:09:40):
for that as the unity, you've got all kinds of
issues there. You can go on as we have gone
on for thousands of years, figuring out what that means,
so that language, instead of being an expressive key from
the individual, becomes a hermeneutical interp of interpretive responses between people,

(01:10:03):
all mediated by a theologically structured background, which of course
allows it to be unresolved and go on and on
and on world without end. And what Jefferson was doing
with his Philosophy of Jesus is saying, look, there is
no theology at all necessary here. There was no Christian Church.

(01:10:32):
He was a sophisticated representative of the Hebrewic religious genius
that said that the individual has the right by design
to have an immediate contact.

Speaker 3 (01:10:46):
With a divine and that was the whole issue, so
that the rights of man begin there, if we understand
it right, because the emphasis is not on theological.

Speaker 1 (01:11:02):
Subtlety, but on personal morality. The ethics of our life
are the only way in which we need to work
out that relationality, that relationship. So the Philosophy of Jesus
was put together in the White House by our third President,
and he attempted to bring all of the Gospels into

(01:11:26):
harmony by having the Philosophy of Jesus laid out, and
it's title page, the Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, abstracted
from the account of his life and doctrines given by
Matthew Mark Locanjohn being an abridgment of the New Testament

(01:11:47):
for the use of the Indians, unembarrassed with the matters
of fast or faith beyond the level of their comprehensions.
It's in his own handwriting on the title page, Wait
a minute, for the use of the Indians. And Jefferson

(01:12:08):
here is bringing he has franklin Esque open cosmic comprehension
to bear. That's right. We have all got to be
Indians in a very special way in order to be Americans,
in order to be free, very peculiar, mysterious until you

(01:12:32):
understand it, and then suddenly it's like the veils of
mists lifting and everything becomes understandable. There was a mystery
in this country. Benjamin Franklin wrote in some of his
letters of a strange account that he was in the

(01:12:53):
deepest coal mines in the world, and they were in
the United States, and they were on the Delaware coastal area,
very close to the seashore. And they went down into
the ground at an angle and went underneath the sea.
And Franklin personally went and toured those coal mines, and

(01:13:17):
when he was going through, he noticed that the strata
of the coal strata were all bent at a certain angle,
and at the top of the strata you could take
a pick and you could pick away at the exact
top of this coal strata. And there in the slate,
a millimeter above the coal, when the coal would come away,

(01:13:39):
there were impressions of leaves and ferns in the slate. Now,
the old Theocratic religion said the world is created in
four thousand and four BC. Franklin says, there's no way
that that coal is only six thousand years old. There's
no way that there are impressions of ferns and leaves

(01:14:02):
underneath the Atlantic Ocean. There must be almost infinities of
time to have allowed all this to occur. And then
Jefferson refined it further because Jefferson put his finger on it.

(01:14:24):
Jefferson was the greatest collector of American English dictionaries with
Indian languages. When he left the White House, he had
more than fifty volumes of all the American Indian languages
with English. That Trunk, incidentally was stolen in Jamestown, turned

(01:14:48):
up later and everything was torn up and ripped up,
and everything lost. But the American Indian languages were for Jefferson,
the core the human heartedness of what Franklin had discovered
in nature. Franklin sought as a natural mystery and natural phenomenon.

(01:15:09):
Jefferson saw it as focused even more on the American
Indian as the prototype of natural man. Because Jefferson was
the first to have the great insight that languages develop,
and it takes time for languages to develop. It takes

(01:15:30):
time for Spanish and French and Italian to differentiate themselves
from Latin. It takes centuries, if not millennia. The American
Indian languages have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
That they are so old that they have lost any

(01:15:53):
kind of cognate since between them. And therefore the American
Indians are ancient as the yells, and man has been
around for so long that we have to use geologic
terms to describe him, and that the theologic structure that's

(01:16:13):
been foisted upon man's religious understanding of himself and nature
is completely a delusion, because he's not making up a speculation.
The language has existed before any Europeans came. They were
differentiated before anybody came. Nobody made that data up, nobody
fudged those documents. And the only irrational explanation is that

(01:16:37):
those languages were so separate because it took tens of
thousands of years for them to differentiate themselves. And Jefferson
loved the American Indians just like Franklin, because they were
like the core, the root core of the natural man.
They didn't have any theological structure. The Great Spirit was

(01:17:00):
available in a personal vision quest Well, it's the only
guarantee of liberty that there is. They were a prime
original man before there was any kind of a complication
by empires. And Jefferson said, we have all got to
look at the New Testament just like the Indians look

(01:17:21):
at it. We have to see it in that prime originalness.
And then we see Jesus as a man that he
occurs to us as a glowing, excellent beacon, that man
can regain his natural rationality about the divinity about himself.

(01:17:47):
The delusions fall aside. This is what was going on.
And he says, we know that his mission was co
opted by theacratic structures because in our own time we've
seen the same darn thing happen with our attempts at liberty,
and we know that there were Federalists back then working

(01:18:09):
to co opt this whole scene even then. So the
important thing is not to lose track of that insight
that if we get trapped thinking that there's some mental
structure which we metaphysically have to spin out to understand,

(01:18:30):
we lose that keen edge of personal directness, which is
the only true indicator of morality, which is the only
way in which the visionary capacity of liberty is maintained
in the individual. So Jefferson was extremely careful on these points.

(01:18:58):
In these issues. Jefferson wrote to John Adams. This is
in the Correspondence of uh Adams and Jefferson and two volumes,
published by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,
nineteen fifty nine. In Volume two, page five ninety one.

(01:19:18):
Jefferson to Adams, Monticello, April eleventh, eighteen twenty three. Dear sir,
the wish is expressed in your last letter that I
may continue in life and health until I become a
Calvinist would make me immortally. He loved Adams. At this time.

(01:19:41):
They made amends, and there are two old men who
could just talk straight to each other. They'd already had
all the shenanigans you can have, and they've got down
finally where they just talked to each other as they pleased.
I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He
was indeed an atheist, which I can never be. Or rather,

(01:20:06):
his religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God,
he did the being described in his Five Points as
not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore,
the creator and benevolent governor of the world, but a
demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to

(01:20:26):
believe in no God at all than to blasphem him
by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed, I think that
every Christian sect gives a great handle to atheism by
their general dogma that without a revelation, there would not
be sufficient proof of the being of a God. Now
one sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians.

(01:20:47):
The other five six men who do not believe in
the Jewish and Christian revelation are without a knowledge of
the existence of a God. This gives completely a gan
de cause to the disciples of a Cellus to me,
as Spinoza, Didirell andd Halbach. The argument which they rest
on as triumphant and unanswerable, is that in every hypothesis

(01:21:09):
of cosmogony, you must admit an eternal pre existence of something,
and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are
never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty, when
one will suffice that's liveness's principle of sufficient reason. While
these were literate gentlemen, very literatient, they say, then that

(01:21:34):
it is more simple to believe at once in the
eternal pre existence of the world as it is now
going on and may go on forever, by the principle
of reproduction, which we see in witness, then to believe
in the eternal pre existence of an ulterior cause or
creator of the world being, whom we see not and

(01:21:55):
know not, of whose form, substance, in mode, or place
of existence or of action. No sense informs us, no
power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend
on the contrary. I hold, without appeal to revelation, that
when we take a view of the universe in its

(01:22:16):
parts general are particular, it is impossible for the human
mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design,
consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition,
the movements of the heavenly bodies so exactly held in

(01:22:38):
their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces,
the structure of the Earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters,
and atmospheres, Animal and vegetable bodies examined in all their minuteness, particles, insects,
mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man

(01:22:58):
or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses. It
is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to
believe that there is in all this design, caused and
effect up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all
things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator, while

(01:23:21):
permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator
into new and other forms. You know, Jefferson was the
first archaeologist when he was president. They found some bones,
large bones. Jefferson uh sent people to the site and

(01:23:44):
he had it excavated. And that was the first dinosaur
skeleton ever turned up. And nobody wanted to say anything.
Nobody had ever seen anything like this. Nobody knew that
there was anything like this. And Jefferson said, well, well

(01:24:04):
we'll keep it because uh, our our children or our
children's children, they'll they'll have the vision, they'll understand what
this is. It was just another indication that the earth
is old and ancient, that man is not a child.
We've been mature for a million years, but we're still

(01:24:27):
capable of being deluded, and that's what has to be changed.
He writes further to Adams, and in the letter concludes

(01:24:47):
with some Greek phrases which he translates them. It truly
means that in the beginning God existed and reason, our
mind was with God, and that mind was God. This
was in the beginning with God. All things were created
by it, and without it was made, not one thing
that was made. And he says, then this text so

(01:25:10):
plainly declaring the doctrine of Jesus. This is from John.
The doctrine of Jesus that the world was created by
the supreme intelligent being, has been perverted by modern Christians
to build up a second person of their tritheism by
a mistranslated imputation of the word logos, one of its

(01:25:33):
legitimate meaning means indeed is a word, but in that
sense it makes an unmeaning jargon, while the other meaning, reason,
equally legitimate, explains rationally the eternal pre existence of God
in his creation of the world. Knowing how incomprehensible it
was that a word, the mere action or articulation of

(01:25:56):
the voice and organs of speech, could create a world,
they would undertake to make of this articulation a second
pre existing being and ascribe to him, not to God,
the creation of the universe. The atheist here plumes himself
on the uselessness of such a God and the simpler
hypothesis of a existent universe. The truth is that the

(01:26:17):
greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling
themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for
the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible and
without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day
will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the

(01:26:38):
Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a
virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation
of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may
hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought
in these United States will do away with all this
artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine
doctrines of this most venerated reform or of human errors.

(01:27:03):
Many closes by saying so much for your quotation of
Kelvin's mon't diu. As you can see from just the
glimpse that we have, it's almost impossible to conceive, of

(01:27:24):
Jefferson that in our current miseducated state, we have been
given such a delusive digest of American history in our
childhood and in our lives, that we are shocked to
realize what we don't know about, even the basics, even
the fundamentals. Is it a can of worms? Don't think so.

(01:27:49):
I think it's called the Torch of Liberty. I think
that's what they called it. Well, we'll do more next week.
Just keep in there, slugging cousco