with touches from FAMILISM and SEEKERISM greatly
vulgarized. Of no sect do we hear more in the pamphlets and
newspapers between 1650 and 1655, though there are traces of them of
earlier date. The pamphlets about them generally take the form of
professed accounts of some of their meetings, with reports of their
profane discourses and the indecencies with which they were
accompanied. There are illustrative wood-cuts in some of the
pamphlets; and, on the whole, I fancy that some low printers and
booksellers made a trade on the public curiosity about the Ranters,
getting up pretended accounts of their meetings as a pretext for
prurient publications. There is plenty of testimony, however, besides
Baxter's word, that there was a real sect of the name pretty widely
spread in low neighbourhoods in towns, and holding meetings. Among
Ranters named in the pamphlets I have noticed a T. Shakespeare. "The
horrid villainies of the sect," says Baxter, "did not only speedily
extinguish it, but also did as much as ever anything did to disgrace
all sectaries, and to restore the credit of the ministry and the
sober unanimous Christians;" and this, or the transfusion of
Ranterism into equivalent phrenzies with other names, may account
for the fact that after a while the pamphlets about the Ranters cease
or become rare. Clearly, in the main, the regulation of such a sect,
so long as it did last, was a matter of police; and the only question
is whether there were any tenets mixed up with Ranterism, or held by
some roughly called Ranters, that were capable of being dissociated,
and that were in fact in some cases dissociated, from offences
against public decency. Exact data are deficient, and there were
probably varieties of Ranters theologically. Pantheism, or the
essential identity of God with the universe, and his indwelling in
every creature, angelic, human, brute, or inorganic, seems to have
been the belief of most Ranters that could manage to rise to a
metaphysics--with which belief was conjoined also a rejection of all
essential distinction between good and evil, and a rejection of all
Scripture as mere dead letter; but from a so-called "Carol of the
Ranters" I infer that Atheism, or at least Mortalism or Materialism
(see Vol. III. p. 156-157), had found refuge among some of the
varieties. Thus:--

"They prate of God! Believe it, fellow-creature,
There's no such bugbear: all was made by Nature.
We know all came of nothing, and sh