on the Immutability of Moral Truth She was a lifelong member of the Church of England, although her apparent free expression of heterodox religious opinions shocked some of her contemporariness and led to accusations of infidelity. In her Treatise she wrote that God was "omnipotent in the largest sense of the word, and that his works and commands" were "founded in righteousness and not in mere will". The Treatise revealed her optimism about humanity and the belief in the attainment of perfection in individuals and society. She also claimed that reason, without faith, was insufficient and wrote of the need for the Church to concentrate "on the practical doctrines of the Christian religion", such as man's God-given powers of bettering his own condition and reducing evil. She also rejected the idea of an inherent human nature: "There is not a virtue or a vice that belongs to humanity, which we do not make ourselves". Macaulay believed in the afterlife. When she became dangerously ill in 1777 in Paris, she told a friend that death did not scare her for it was but "a short separation between virtuous friends" after which they would be reunited "in a more perfect state". Letters on Education She wrote in 1790 in her Letters on Education, as Mary Wollstonecraft did two years later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the apparent weakness of women was due to their mis-education. In the Letters she wrote "the thoughts of a fatherless universe, and a set of beings let loose by chance or fate on one another, without other law than power dictates and opportunity gives a right to exact, chills the sensibility of the feeling mind into indifference and despair". American visit She was personally associated with many leading figures among the American Revolutionaries. She was the first English radical to visit America after independence, staying there from 15 July 1784 to 17 July 1785. Macaulay visited James Otis and his sister, Mercy Otis Warren. Mercy wrote afterwards that Macaulay was "a lady whose Resources of knowledge seem to be almost inexhaustible" and wrote to John Adams that she was "a Lady of most Extraordinary talent, a Commanding Genius and Brilliance of thought". According to Mercy's biographer, Macaulay had "a more profound influence on Mercy than had any other woman of her era". She then visited New York and met Richard Henry Lee, who