One of his favorite amusements
at Princeton was to burlesque the precise and perhaps ungraceful
Presbyterians of the place. The library of his Virginian home, it
appears, was furnished with a great supply of what the French mildly
call the literature of incredulity,--Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Diderot, D'Alembert, and the rest. The boy, in his rage for knowledge,
had read vast quantities of this literature, and, of course, embraced
the theory of the writers that pushed denial farthest. For twenty-two
years, he says in one of his letters, he never entered a church. Great
pleasure it gave him to show how superior the Mahometan religion was
to the Christian, and to recite specimens of what he took delight in
styling Hebrew jargon. The Psalms of David were his special aversion.
Almost all gifted and fearless lads that have lived in Christendom
during the last hundred years have had a fit of this kind between
fifteen and twenty-five. The strength of the tendency to question the
grounds of belief must be great indeed to bear away with it a youth
like this, formed by Nature to believe.
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