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.