University of Virginia Library

No. X.

John Randolph's Recantation.

Mr. John Randolph, of Roanoke, was at one time deeply impressed
with religion, and in a pious frame of mind revised his copy of Gibbon's
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he had filled
with notes approving the deistical views of the historian. These notes,
or most of them, he obliterated, and on the celebrated fifteenth chapter, in
which the historian gives an account of the rise of Christianity, on either
side of the text of several pages, he wrote the following remarks, which I
now copy for you from the book before me:—

"When the pencilled notes to this and the succeeding chapter were
written, (and, indeed, all the notes, one excepted in volume tenth, page —,)
the writer was an unhappy young man, deluded by the sophisms of infidelity.
Gibbon seemed to rivet what Hume and Hobbes and Bolingbroke
and Voltaire, &c. had made fast, and Satan—i. e. the evil principle in our
(fallen) nature—had cherished; but—praised be His Holy name!—God sent
the sense of sin and the arrow of the angel of Death, `unless ye repent,'
straight to his heart, and with it came the desire of belief; but the hard
heart of unbelief withstood a long time, and fear came upon him and waxed
great, and brought first resignation to his will, and after much refractoriness,
(God be praised, but never sufficiently, that he bore with the frowardness
of the child of sin, whose wages is death,) after a longer course
of years, more than the servitude of Jacob for Rachel, God in his good
time sent the pardon and the peace which passeth in the love which struck
out fear. Allelujah."

The above is a true transcript from the original pencilled remarks of Mr.
Randolph. His copy of Gibbon is in twelve volumes, printed in Dublin
in 1784. The book belonged to Richard Randolph, the elder brother of
John, and has Richard's name in it, with the endorsement "Matoax,
1790."