Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - András Tarnóc: "Jefferson Still Survives".

the superstition of the Church, the authority of the military and the malaise of ignorance".

6 The lofty egalitarianism of the Declaration notwithstanding, Jefferson is often criticized as an elitist since the text does not make mention of women and slaves. The famous clause "all men are created equal" is frequently held up as a mirror to force American society to face its paradox nature. The greatest asset of the Declaration of Independence is not its presentment of hitherto unheard of revolutionary ideas, but its eloquent yet succinct elevation of the achievements of Western thought to universal level. The famous statement: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" reverberated through not only American but world history as well. Eighty-seven years later Abraham Lincoln equated the Civil War with the defense of the ideas of the Declaration and in 1963 Martin Luther King in his celebrated "I have a dream" speech at the Washington Memorial rebuked America for her digression from the Jeffersonian ideal. Jefferson's ideas inspired revolutionaries in Paris in 1789, in Budapest in 1848 and even in Saigon in 1945. While the Declaration is a call to arms of individual political freedom, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom defends the independence of the human mind. The statute was written in 1781 at a time when the clergy dominated all aspects of public life in the Old World and five of the thirteen American states displayed elements of an established church.

7 Whereas Rousseau, Mably and Sebastien Mercier attacked the abuses of the church, these philosophes accepted the notion of an establishment or a state supported church. Jefferson rejected the idea of an 6 Ibid., p. 186. 7 Henry Steele Commager, "Jefferson and the Enlightenment," in Thomas Jefferson. The Man. His World. His Influence ed. Lally Weymouth (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1973), p. 56. 121