NDALL AND HIS TRANSLATIONS

Another seventeenth-century interpreter of religion as direct and
immediate experience of God was Giles Randall, who, like John Everard,
was a scholar, a translator of religious books, and a powerful popular
preacher. If one knew him only through the accounts of the
heresy-hunters of the period, one would suppose him to have been a
disseminator of the most "virulent poyson" for the soul; but a careful
examination of all the material available convinces me that he was a
high-minded, sincere, and fearless bearer of the message of the
present, living, inwardly-experienced Christ, as Eternal Spirit, Divine
Light, and Word of God.

It is extremely difficult, from the fragmentary details at hand, to
construct a biographical account of Randall, but the following sketch
of him seems fairly well supported by facts:

He was the son of Edward Randall of Chipping Wycombe, Bucks, and
received his B.A. from Lincoln College, Oxford, February 13,
1625-6.[53] He was probably the nephew of John Randall, B.D.
(1570-1622), an eminent Puritan divine, a man of good scholarship and
of large means, who bequeathed by will his house and garden to his
"loveing Nephewe Gyles Randall."[54] He seems to have been for some
years a minister in good odour and repute, and to have given no
occasion of complaint against his doctrine before 1643. He probably
was the Giles Randall who was arrested in 1637 and tried in the Star
Chamber for {254} preaching against "ship-money" as unjust and an
offence against God, since it was, he declared in his sermon, "a way of
taking burdens off rich men's shoulders and laying them on the necks of
poor men."[55] He was again before the Star Chamber--this time it is
certainly our Giles Randall--in 1643 charged with preaching
"anabaptism," "familism," and "antinomianism," according to the usual
labels of the time. He had been for some years preaching peaceably at
"the Spital" in London with great multitudes of people nocking to hear
him.[56] The charge of heresy was brought against Randall for a sermon
which he was said to have preached in St. Martin Orgar's, a soundly
orthodox church, in Candlewick ward, London--the charge being that he
preached against "the mandatory and obligatory nature of the law as a
Christian rule to walk by," and asserted that a child of God can live
as sinless a life as Christ's was.[57] He was "removed" from the
ministry "for his anabaptism" in the autumn of 1