 | John Randolph |  |
RANDOLPH'S ACCOUNT OF HIS CONVERSION.
In writing to his old friend, Dr. Brockenbrough, Randolph
evidently refers to a previous letter in which he has intimated
a change of heart and convictions in matters religious,
"Your imputing such sentiments to a heated imagination
does not surprise me, who have been bred in the school of
Hobbs, and Bayle and Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, and
Hume, and Voltaire, and Gibbon; who have cultivated the
skeptical philosophy from my vainglorious boyhood—I might
almost say childhood—and who have felt all that unutterable
disgust which hypocrisy and cant and fanaticism never fail
to excite in men of education and refinement, superadded to
our natural repugnance to Christianity. I am not even now
insensible to this impression; but as the excesses of her
friends (real or pretended) can never alienate the votary of
liberty from a free form of government and enlist him under
the banners of despotism, so neither can the cant of fanaticism,
or hypocrisy, or of both, disgust the pious with true
religion.
"Mine has been no sudden change of opinion. I can refer
to a record, showing, on my part, a desire of more than nine
years' standing to partake of the Sacrament of the Lord's
Supper; although for two and twenty years preceding my
feet had never crossed the threshold of the house of prayer.
This desire I was restrained from indulging by the fear of
eating and drinking unrighteously. And although that fear
hath been cast out by perfect love, I have never yet gone to
the altar, neither have I been present at the performance of
divine service, unless indeed I may so call my reading the
liturgy of our church and some chapters of the Bible to my
poor negroes on Sundays. Such passages as I think require
it, and which I feel competent to explain, I comment upon—
enforcing as far as possible, and dwelling upon those texts
good life as the touchstone of the true faith. The Sermon
from the Mount and the Evangelists generally; the Epistle of
Paul to the Ephesians, chap. vi; the General Epistle of
James and the First Epistle of John; these are my chief texts.
"The consummation of my conversion—I use the word in
its stricted sense—is owing to a variety of causes, but chiefly
to the conviction, unwillingly forced upon me, that the very
few friends which an unprosperous life (the fruit of an ungovernable
temper) had left me were daily losing their hold
upon me, in a firmer grasp of ambition, avarice or sensuality.
I am not sure that, to complete the anti-climax, avarice
should not have been last; for, although in some of its effects,
debauchery be more disgusting than avarice, yet as it regards
the unhappy victim, this last is more to be dreaded. Dissipation,
as well as power or prosperity, hardens the heart;
but avarice deadens it to every feeling but the thirst for
riches.
"Avarice alone could have produced the slave-trade; avarice
alone can drive, as it does drive, this infernal traffic, and
the wretched victims of it, like so many post-horses, whipped
to death in a mail-coach. Ambition has its reward in the
pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war; but where are
the trophies of avarice?—the handcuff, the menacle and the
blood-stained cowhide?"
| John Randolph | |