“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 shall pass
  Into the same condition once it was
  By Nature’s power, and that they grossly lie
  That say there’s hope of immortality. 
  Let them but tell us what a soul is:  then
  We shall adhere to these mad brainsick men."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Baxter’s Life, 76-77; and Thomason Pamphlets passim.  The pamphlet last quoted is in Vol. 485 (old numbering).  I have also used a quotation from another pamphlet in Barclay’s Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth (1876), pp. 417-418.]

STRAY FANATICS:  THE MUGGLETONIANS:—­Sometimes confounded with the Ranters, but really distinguishable, were some crazed men, whose crazes had taken a religious turn, and whose extravagances became contagious.—­Such was a John Robins, first heard of about 1650, when he went about, sometimes as God Almighty, sometimes as Adam raised from the dead, with the power of raising others from the dead.  He had raised Cain and Judas, and other personages of Scripture, forgiving their sins and blessing them; which personages, changed in character, but remembering their former selves quite well, went about in Robins’s company and were seen and talked with by various people.  He could work miracles, and in dark rooms would exhibit himself surrounded with angels, and fiery serpents, and shining lights, or riding in the air.  He had been sent to Bridewell, and his supernatural powers had left him.—­One heard next, in 1652, of two associates, called John Reeve and Ludovick Muggleton, who professed to be “the two last Spiritual Witnesses (Rev. xi.) and alone true Prophets of the Lord Jesus Christ, God alone blessed to all eternity.”  They believed in a real man-shaped God, existing from all eternity, who had come upon earth as Jesus Christ, leaving Moses and Elijah to represent him in Heaven—­also in the mortality of the soul till the resurrection of the body; and their chief commission was to denounce and curse all false prophets, and all who did not believe in Reeves and Muggleton.  They visited Robins in Bridewell and told him to stop his preaching under pain of eternal damnation; but they favoured some eminent Presbyterian and Independent ministers of London with letters to the same effect.  They dated their letters “from Great Trinity Lane, at a Chandler’s shop, against one Mr. Millis, a brown baker, near Bow Lane End;” and the editor of Mercurius Politicus, who had received one of their letters so dated, had the curiosity to go to see them, with some friends of his, in the end of August 1653.  He found them “at the top of an old house in a cockloft,” and made a paragraph of them thus:—­“They are said to be a couple of tailors:  but only one of them works, and that is Muggleton; the other, they say, writes prophecies.  We found two women there whom they