There are two acts in the life of Jefferson to which I shall allude, and which I think will sufficiently demonstrate the profound interest he had in the subject of religion. The first is the writing of a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, on the subject of that young man's religious studies. He urges him to a thorough and candid investigation of the subject of religion without regard to consequences. If young Carr's investigation ended in the conviction that there was no God, Jefferson was of opinion that his young relative would still find incentives to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness of its practice, and in the love of others it would procure for him. If on the other hand he should find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that he was acting under the divine approval--and I think the idea which follows has never been sufficiently emphasized--the fact of that divine approval would be "a vast additional incitement" to the practice of virtue. If he should find that Jesus was also a God, the student would derive comfort by the belief in his aid and love. Reason was the only oracle given him of heaven, and he was not responsible for the "rightness" of his decision, but he would be responsible for the "uprightness" of it. The other incident alluded to is Jefferson's complication of the four-fold text of the "Life and Morals of Jesus," consisting of selected texts from the four evangelists. I mean by "four-fold compilation" that he cut the passages respectively from Greek, Latin, French and English copies of the New Testament. For the "teachings of Jesus" he selected "only those passages whose style and spirit proved them genuine, and his own." This compilation was his own effort to "knock down the artificial scaffolding reared to mask from view the simple structure of Jesus." And of the teaching of Jesus thus set forth, he said: "A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." I am not claiming that the Christianity of Jefferson was orthodox. His correspondence with Dr. Priestly, and his open admiration for the teaching of Dr. Channing fix the nature of his belief in the founder of Christianity. I refer to these matters merely to show that to the mind of this remarkable man religion was a subject of profound interest and respect; and also to suggest that it was really the religious nature of the man that prompted the part he took in securing religious freedom in the commonwealth of Virginia, and through that circumstance, with another to be mentioned later, aided mightily in securing religious freedom in America.