The most moving quote I came across during my research did not actually relate directly to religious freedom. It was the letter Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams upon hearing of Abigail Adams’s death. Recall that the two men had been comrades in the revolutionary years, then bitter enemies and then friends again as old men, when they sustained an extraordinary correspondence. It strikes me as one of the most beautiful condolence messages I’ve ever seen:

“The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October 20. had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself, in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief nor, altho’ mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more, where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit, in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.”

Besides its beauty, the significance of the letter is that it shows that Jefferson believed in Heaven and an afterlife. Jefferson is often described as a Deist. I don’t believe he was a pure Deist, at least not for his entire life. Deists believed that God created the laws of the universe (Jeffersson agreed with that) but that He then receded from the action. In this and other letters, Jefferson imagines a “future state” determined by one’s behavior’s in this life.