natural friends, instead of natural enemies, which this change of position would make them.  My letters of April the 25th, May the 5th, and this present one have been written, without any disguise, in this view; and while safe in your hands they can never do any thing but good.  But you and I are now at that time of life when our call to another state of being cannot be distant, and may be near.  Besides, your government is in the habit of seizing papers without notice.  These letters might thus get into hands, which, like the hornet which extracts poison from the same flower that yields honey to the bee, might make them the ground of blowing up a flame between our two countries, and make our friendship and confidence in each other effect exactly the reverse of what we are aiming at.  Being yourself thoroughly possessed of every idea in them, let me ask from your friendship an immediate consignment of them to the flames.  That alone can make all safe, and ourselves secure.

I intended to have answered you here, on the subject of your agency in the transacting what money matters we may have at Paris, and for that purpose meant to have conferred with Mr. Gallatin.  But he has, for two or three days, been confined to his room, and is not yet able to do business.  If he is out before Mr. Monroe’s departure, I will write an additional letter on that subject.  Be assured that it will be a great additional satisfaction to me to render services to yourself and sons by the same acts which shall at the same time promote the public service.  Be so good as to present my respectful salutations to Madame Dupont, and to accept yourself assurances of my constant and affectionate friendship and great respect.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CCCIV.—­TO DOCTOR BENJAMIN RUSH, April 21, 1803

TO DOCTOR BENJAMIN RUSH.

Washington, April 21, 1803.

Dear Sir,

In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic:  and I then promised you, that, one day or other, I would give you my views of it.  They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions.  To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.  I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.  At the short intervals since these conversations, when I could justifiably abstract my mind from public affairs, the subject has been under my contemplation.  But the more I considered it, the more it expanded beyond the measure