He obtained some relief at length, and became a regular communicant of the Episcopal Church.  But although he ever after manifested an extreme regard for religious things and persons, and would never permit either to be spoken against in his presence without rebuke, he was very far from edifying his brethren by a consistent walk.  At Washington, in the debates, he was as incisive and uncharitable as before.  His denunciations of the second President Adams’s personal character were as outrageous as his condemnation of parts of his policy was just.  Mr. Clay, though removed from the arena of debate by his appointment to the Department of State, was still the object of his bitter sarcasm; and at length he included the President and the Secretary in that merciless philippic in which he accused Mr. Clay of forgery, and styled the coalition of Adams and Clay as “the combination of the Puritan and the Blackleg.”  He used language, too, in the course of this speech, which was understood to be a defiance to mortal combat, and it was so reported to Mr. Clay.  The reporters, however, misunderstood him, as it was not his intention nor his desire to fight.  Nevertheless, to the astonishment and sorrow of his religious friends, he accepted Mr. Clay’s challenge with the utmost possible promptitude, and bore himself throughout the affair like (to use the poor, lying, tory cant of the last generation) “a high-toned Virginia gentleman.”  Colonel Benton tells us that Mr. Randolph invented an ingenious excuse for the enormous inconsistency of his conduct on this occasion.  A duel, he maintained, was private war, and was justifiable on the same ground as a war between two nations.  Both were lamentable, but both were allowable when there was no other way of getting redress for insults and injuries.  This was plausible, but it did not deceive him.  He knew very well that his offensive language respecting a man whom he really esteemed was wholly devoid of excuse.  He had the courage requisite to expiate the offence by standing before Mr. Clay’s pistol; but he could not stand before his countrymen and confess that his abominable antithesis was but the spurt of mingled ill-temper and the vanity to shine.  Any good tory can fight a duel with a respectable degree of composure; but to own one’s self, in the presence of a nation, to have outraged the feelings of a brother-man, from the desire to startle and amuse an audience, requires the kind of valor which tories do not know.  “Whig and tory,” says Mr. Jefferson, “belong to natural history.”  But then there is such a thing, we are told, as the regeneration of the natural man; and we believe it, and cling to it as a truth destined one day to be resuscitated and purified from the mean interpretations which have made the very word sickening to the intelligence of Christendom.  Mr. Randolph had not achieved the regeneration of his nature.  He was a tory still.  In the testing hour, the “high-toned Virginia gentleman” carried the day, without a struggle, over the communicant.