RANTERS:—­“These made it their business,” says Baxter, “to set up the Light of Nature under the name of Christ in Man, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, the Scripture, and the present Ministry, and our worship and ordinances; and called men to hearken to Christ within them.  But withal they conjoined a cursed doctrine of Libertinism, which brought them to all abominable filthiness of life.  They taught, as the FAMILISTS, (see Vol.  III. p. 152), that God regardeth not the actions of the outward man, but of the heart, and that to the pure all things are pure ...  I have seen myself letters written from Abington, where among both soldiers and people this contagion did then prevail, full of horrid oaths and curses and blasphemy, not fit to be repeated by the tongue or pen of man; and this all uttered as the effect of knowledge and a part of their Religion, in a fanatic strain, and fathered on the Spirit of God.”  The Ranters, in fact, seem to have been ANTINOMIANS (see Vol.  III. 151-152) run mad, 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:—­