r of Antrim Parish, Halifax County, Virginia, wrote that the
widow of Patrick Henry told him that her husband used to receive "the
communion as often as an opportunity was offered, and on such
occasions always fasted until after he had communicated, and spent the
day in the greatest retirement. This he did both while governor and
afterward."[450] In a letter to one of his daughters, written in 1796,
he makes this touching confession:--

"Amongst other strange things said of me, I hear it is said
by the deists that I am one of the number; and, indeed, that
some good people think I am no Christian. This thought gives
me much more pain than the appellation of Tory; because I
think religion of infinitely higher importance than
politics; and I find much cause to reproach myself that I
have lived so long, and have given no decided and public
proofs of my being a Christian. But, indeed, my dear child,
this is a character which I prize far above all this world
has, or can boast."[451]

While he thus spoke, humbly and sorrowfully, of his religious position
as a thing so little known to the public that it could be entirely
misunderstood by a portion of them, it is plain that no one who had
seen him in the privacy of his life at home could have had any
misunderstanding upon that subject. For years before his retirement
from the law, it had been his custom, we are told, to spend "one hour
every day ... in private devotion. His hour of prayer was the close of
the day, including sunset; ... and during that sacred hour, none of
his family intruded upon his privacy."[452]

As regards his religious faith, Patrick Henry, while never
ostentatious of it, was always ready to avow it, and to defend it. The
French alliance during our Revolution, and our close intercourse with
France immediately afterward, hastened among us the introduction of
certain French writers who were assailants of Christianity, and who
soon set up among the younger and perhaps brighter men of the country
the fashion of casting off, as parts of an outworn and pitiful
superstition, the religious ideas of their childhood, and even the
morality which had found its strongest sanctions in those ideas. Upon
all this, Patrick Henry looked with grief and alarm. In his opinion, a
far deeper, a far wiser and nobler handling of all the immense
questions involved in the problem of the truth of Christianity was
furnished by such