ter to Doctor Priestley, the subject being still
in my mind, I had leisure, during an abstraction from business for a day
or two, while on the road, to think a little more on it, and to sketch
more fully than I had done to him, a syllabus of the matter which I
thought should enter into the work. I wrote it to Doctor Rush; and there
ended all my labor on the subject; himself and Doctor Priestley being
the only depositories of my secret. The fate of my letter to Priestley,
after his death, was a warning to me on that of Doctor Rush; and at my
request, his family were so kind as to quiet me by returning my original
letter and syllabus. By this you will be sensible how much interest I
take in keeping myself clear of religious disputes before the public;
and especially of seeing my syllabus disembowelled by the Aruspices of
the modern Paganism. Yet I enclose it to you with entire confidence,
free to be perused by yourself and Mrs. Adams, but by no one else; and
to be returned to me.

You are right in supposing, in one of yours, that I had not read much of
Priestley's Predestination, his no-soul system, or his controversy with
Horsley. But I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, and Early
Opinions of Jesus, over and over again; and I rest on them, and
on Middleton's writings, especially his letters from Rome, and to
Waterland, as the basis of my own faith. These writings have never been
answered, nor can be answered by quoting historical proofs, as they have
done. For these facts, therefore, I cling to their learning, so much
superior to my own.

I now fly off in a tangent to another subject. Marshall, in the first
volume of his history, chapter 3, p. 180, ascribes the petition to the
King, of 1774, (1 Journ. Cong. 67) to the pen of Richard Henry Lee. I
think myself certain, it was not written by him, as well from what I
recollect to have heard, as from the internal evidence of style. He
was loose, vague, frothy, rhetorical. He was a poorer writer than his
brother Arthur; and Arthur's standing may be seen in his Monitor's
Letters, to insure the sale of which, they took the precaution of
tacking to them a new edition of the Farmer's Letters; like Mezentius,
who '_mortua jungebat corpora vivis_.' You were of the committee, and
can tell me who wrote this petition; and who wrote the Address to the
Inhabitants of the Colonies, ib. 45. Of the papers of July 1775, I
recollect well that Mr. Dickinson drew the petition to the Ki