of genius. I cannot judge it, nor class it, nor compare it in that respect, because it is my own. But I know it as a moral work; I can judge and dare pronounce upon its tendency, its beneficial effect upon every candid mind; and I am confident you will yet join me in opinion. But let me repeat my prayer that you will not mistake the spirit of this observation. It is not from vanity that I speak; my book is not a work of genius; the maxims in it are not my own; they are yours, they are those of good men that have gone before us both; they are drawn from the gospel, from history, from the unlettered volume of moral nature, from the experience and the inexperience of unhappy man in his various struggles after happiness; from all his errors and all his objects in the social state. My only merit lies in putting them together with fidelity. My work is only a transcript of the tablet of my mind imprest with these images as they pass before it.

You will see that I have nothing to do with the unbelievers who have attacked the christian system either before the French revolution, or during or since that monumental period. I am not one of them. You say I resemble them not in any thing else; you will now add that I resemble them not in this.

So far as you have discovered a cause of the failure of that revolution in the renunciation of the christian faith by those who held, in stormy quick succession, the reins of your government, I thank you for the discovery. I was in want of more causes than I had yet perceived, to account for the unhappy catastrophe of that gigantic struggle of all the virtues against all the vices that political society has known. You have discovered a cause; but there is such a thing in logic as the cause of a cause. I have thought, but perhaps it is an error, that the reason why the minds of the French people took the turn they did, on the breaking out of the revolution, was to be found in the complicated ceremonials of their worship, and what you yourself would term the nonessentials of their religion.

The reasonable limits of a letter will not allow me to do justice to this idea. To give it the proper development would require five times the volume that I shall give to the present communication. The innumerable varieties of pomp and circumstance which the discipline of the church had inculcated and enjoined, became so incorporated with the vital principles of faith and practice; and these exteriors were overloaded with abuses to such a degree, that to discriminate and take them down, without injuring the system, required a nicer eye than the people can possess, a steadier hand than can comport with the hurried movement of a great revolution.

The scaffolding of your church, permit me to say it, had so enclosed, perforated, overlooked and underpropt the building, that we could not

be surprised, though sorely grieved, to see the reformer lay his hand, like a blind Sampson, to the great substantial pillars, heave and overturn the whole encumbered edifice together, and bury himself in the ruins. Why did they make a goddess of reason? Why erect a statue of liberty? a mass of dead matter for a living energetic principle! Have the courage, my good friend, to answer these questions. You know it was for the same cause that the people of Moses made their golden calf. The calf Apis had from time immemorial become a god in Egypt. The people were in the habit of seeing their divine protector in that substantial boval form, with two horns, four legs and a tail; and this habit was so interwoven in the texture of their mind as to become a part of the intellectual man. The privations incident to a whole moving nation subjected them to many calamities. No human hand could relieve them; they felt a necessity of seeking aid from a supernatural agent, but no satisfaction in praying to an invisible God. They had never thought of such a being; and they could not bring themselves at once to the habit of forming conceptions of him with sufficient clearness and confidence to make him an object of adoration, to which they could address their supplications in the day of great affliction.

Forty years of migration were judged necessary to suppress the habit of using idols in their worship; during which time their continual marches would render it at once inconvenient for the people to move their heavy gods, and to conceal them in their baggage; while the severity of military discipline must expose their tents and their effects to the frequent inspection of their officers.

Shall I apply this principle to the French nation in her revolution? No, my friend, it is too delicate a task for a foreigner who has received her hospitality; I will leave it to your own compassionate and philanthropic mind. You will recollect how often I partook of your grief during that scene of moral degradation. No sooner did you and the other virtuous leaders in the revolution begin to speak of august liberty, holy reason and the divine rights of man, than the artizans took up the hammer, the chissel and the plaister of Paris. They must reduce these gods to form before they could present them to the people with any chance of their being understood; they must create before they could adore. Trace this principle through five years of your history, and you will find why the catholic religion was overturned, morality laid asleep, and the object of the revolution irretrievably lost, as least for our day.

My dear Gregoire, I am glad you have written me this letter, though at first it gave me pain. I was sorry to find myself so entirely misconceived by a friend so highly valued; but I see your attack is easily repelled, a thing which I know will give you pleasure, and it furnishes me an occasion at the same time to render a piece of justice

to myself in relation to my fellow citizens. You must know I have enemies in this country. Not personal ones; I never had a personal enemy, to my knowledge, in any country. But they are political enemies, the enemies of republican liberty, and a few of their followers who never read my writings; that is my writings that I wrote, but only those that I did not write; such as were forged and published for me in my absence; many of which I never have seen, and some of which I did not hear of till ten years after they had been printed in the American gazettes.

It has even been said and published by these christian editors, (I never heard of it till lately) that I went to the bar of your convention, when it was the fashion so to do, and made a solemn recantation of my christian faith, declaring myself an atheist or deist, or some other antichristian apostate; I know not what, for I never yet have seen the piece. Now, as an active member of that convention, a steady attendant at their sittings, and my most intimate friend, you know that such a thing could not be done without your knowledge; you know therefore that it was not done; you know I never went but once to the bar of that convention, which was on the occasion to which you allude in the letter now before me, to present an address from the constitutional society in London, of which I was a member. You know I always sympathised in your grief and partook of all your resentment while such horrors and blasphemies were passing, of which these typographical cannibals of reputation have made me a participant.

These calumnies you see could not be refuted by me while I did not know of their existence. But there is another reason which you will not conceive of till I inform you. The editors of newspapers, you know, ought to be considered as exercising a sacred function; they are the high priests of public opinion, which is the high court of character, the guardian of public morals. Now I am ashamed to inform you that there are editors in this country who will publish the grossest calumny against a citizen, and refuse to publish its refutation. This is an immorality unknown in France since the death of Marat.

A private letter of mine, written from Paris, was mutilated in this country, made to say things that I never wrote nor thought, and published in all our anti-republican papers. I saw it a year after the date and immediately wrote an explanatory letter, which re-established my first intention. This last I then published in Paris, London and Philadelphia. Not one editor who printed the original mutilated letter has, to this day, printed my answer; though it was published in all those places ten years ago. And perhaps not one person in twenty who read the first has ever seen the second, or yet knows of its existence, except these editors who refused to publish it.

You must not suppose from this statement of facts that I am angry with these people. On the contrary, I pity and forgive them. And there is no great merit in this, for they are not my enemies. They only do the work they are set about by their patrons and supporters, the monarchists of America. Their object is not to injure me, but to destroy the effect of my republican writings.

They now publish your letter with great avidity because they think it will tend to decry my poem. It may have this effect in a small degree; but I still thank them for multiplying your publication. There is no work of yours that I do not wish to see universally read in America; and I hope soon to find in our language and in the hands of all our readers your last very curious and interesting treatise de la literature des negres. It is a work of indefatigable research, and brings to light many facts unknown in this country; where the cause of humanity is most interested in propagating that species of knowledge. I hope the manuscript copy of Mr. Warden's translation is not lost; or if it is, that he will be able to furnish our booksellers with another.

If I had renounced christianity, as your letter seems to suppose, that letter and my reflections on your life and conversation would certainly bring me back. For you judge me right when you say I am not ashamed to own myself possibly in the wrong; or in other words to confess myself a man. The gospel has surely done great good in the world; and if, as you imagine, I am indebted in any measure to that for the many excellent qualities of my wife, I owe it much indeed.

I must now terminate my letter; or I shall be obliged to turn from you to the public, with an apology for making it so long; since I must offer it to the public in my country, and trust to your sense of justice to do the same in yours and in your language, in order to give it a chance of meeting your letter in the hands of all its readers. If, thus united, they serve no other purpose, they will be at least a short lived monument of our friendship, and furnish one example of the calmness and candor with which a dispute may be conducted, even on the subject of religion. Your affectionate friend,

KALORAMA, 13th Sept. 1809.

JOEL BARLOW.

The author of the preceding letter requests those editors of public journals, who have published Gregoire's letter, to insert the answer as soon as possible. It is an act of justice due to him, and to the character of their journals, as well as to the author.