all 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 th
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