644, though he
continued to preach after being "removed."[58] The famous drag-nets of
heresy give us a few more details of Randall's "poysonous" doctrine.
Edwards says that Randall taught that "our common food, ordinary eating
and drinking, is a sacrament of Christ's death," and that "all
creatures [_i.e._ everything in the visible creation] held forth God in
Christ."[59] Samuel Rutherford charges him with teaching a possible
perfection in this life: "Randall, the antinomian and Familist says,
those persons are ever learning and never coming to knowledge who say
that perfection is not attainable in this life."[60] He further
charges that Randall in a sermon said that "Christ's Parables, from
Sowing, a Draw-net, Leaven, etc., did prove that to expound the
Scriptures by allegories was lawfull and that all the things of this
life, as Seeds, the Wayside, a Rocke, the Sea, a {255} Net, the Leaven,
etc., were sacraments of Christ . . . and that a spiritual minde might
see the mysteries of the Gospel in all the things of nature and of this
life. This man who preacheth most abomnable Familisme is suffered in
and about London publickly, twise on the Lord's Day, to draw hundreds
of Godly people after him!"[61]

John Etherington throws a little more light upon the nature of this
"abomnable Familism," which so many godly people liked. He says that
Randall taught in his sermons that when a person is baptized with the
Holy Ghost he knows all things, and has entered into the deep mystery
which is "like the great ocean where there is no casting anchor nor
sounding the bottome"; that perfection and the resurrection are
attainable in the present time; that "those who have the Spirit have
nothing to doe with the law nor with the baptism of repentance which
John preached"; "he presumes to turn the holy writings of Moses, the
Prophets, of Christ and His Apostles into Allegories," and gives "a
spiritual meaning" to the same.[62] It is clear from the comments of
these crumb-pickers of pernicious doctrine that Giles Randall, as a
preacher, was teaching the views now quite familiar to us. He was
teaching that the whole world is a revelation of God, that Christ is
God fully revealed; that the Divine Spirit, incarnate in Him, comes
upon men still and brings them into the bottomless, unsoundable deeps
of Life with God, and makes it possible for them to attain a perfect
life; that the Scriptures as outward and legal must be transcended, and