RANTERS

This article appears in Volume V22, Page 895 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PYR-RAY

RANTERS , an antinomian and spiritualistic English sect in the time of the

Commonwealth

COMMONWEALTH

, who may be described as the dregs of the Seeker

movement

MOVEMENT

. Their central

idea

IDEA (Gr. Ibia, connected with i&eiv, to see; cf. Lat. species from specere, to look at)

was pantheistic, that God is essentially in every creature, but though many of them were sincere and honest in their attempt to express the

doctrine

DOCTRINE

of the Divine immanence, they were in the main unable to hold the

balance

BALANCE (derived through the Fr. from the Late Lat. bilantia, an apparatus for weighing, from bi, two, and lanx, a dish or scale)

. They denied

Church

, Scripture, the current ministry and services, calling on men to hearken to Christ within them. Many of them seem to have rejected a belief in immortality and in a personal God, and in many ways they resemble the Brethren of the Free Spirit in the 14th century. Their vague pantheism landed them in moral confusion, and many of them were marked by fierce fanaticism. How far the accusation of lewdness brought against them is just is hard to say, but they seem to have been a really serious peril to the nation. They were largely recruited from the common people, and there is plenty of evidence to show that the

movement

MOVEMENT

was widespread. The Ranters came into contact and even rivalry with the early

Quakers

QUAKERS

, who were often unjustly associated with them. The truth is that the positive

message

MESSAGE (a word occurring in slightly different forms in several languages, e.g. Fr. message, Span. mensaje, Ital. messagio; adapted from the Low Lat. missaticum, from mittere)

of the Friends helped to save England from being overrun with Ranterism. Samuel

Fisher

, a Friend, writing in 1653, gives a calm and instructive account of the Ranters, which with other relevant information, including Richard

Baxter

's rather hysterical attack, may be read in Rufus M. Jones's Studies in Mystical Religion (1go9), xix. In the middle of the 19th century the name was often applied to the Primitive Methodists, with reference to their crude and of ten noisy preaching.

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