Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/91

80 admitted into a Federalist house. Every dissolute intriguer, loose-liver, forger, false-coiner, and prison­-bird; every hair-brained, loud-talking demagogue; every speculator, scoffer, and atheist,—was a fol­lower of Jefferson; and Jefferson was himself the incarnation of their theories.

A literature belonging to this subject exists,—­stacks of newspapers and sermons, mostly dull, and wanting literary merit. In a few of them Jefferson figured under the well-remembered disguises of Puri­tan politics: he was Ephraim, and had mixed him­self among the people; had apostatized from his God and religion; gone to Assyria, and mingled himself among the heathen; "gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not;" or he was Jeroboam, who drove Israel from following the Lord, and made them sin a great sin. He had doubted the authority of revelation, and ventured to suggest that petrified shells found embedded in rocks fifteen thousand feet above sea-level could hardly have been left there by the Deluge, because if the whole atmosphere were condensed as water, its weight showed that the seas would be raised only fifty-two and a half feet. Scep­tic as he was, he could not accept the scientific theory that the ocean-bed had been uplifted by natural forces; but although he had thus instantly deserted this bat­tery raised against revelation, he had still expressed the opinion that a universal deluge was equally un­satisfactory as an explanation, and had avowed pref­erence for a profession of ignorance rather than a