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Updated: June 24, 2025
Yet presently he closed his book, which I now perceived to be a Bible, and fixed an earnest gaze on me. I set him down as a Ranter, and was in no way surprised when he began to inveigh against the evils of the times, and to prophesy the judgment of God on the sins of the city. "Pestilence hath come and fire hath come," he cried.
Their pleasure in passing dreadful sentences was very thinly disguised, indeed, by certain lofty conventional phrases as to the necessity of upholding the law, morality, and religion; they were, indeed, as familiar with the name of the Deity as any ranter in a conventicle, and the "enormity of the crime" was an expression as constantly used in the case of the theft of a loaf of bread, or of an old coat left hanging on a hedge, by some ill-clad, half-starved wretch, as in cases of burglary, arson, rape, and murder.
I pressed him hard and merrily, when it appeared that he was as thorough a Ranter as my friend Phineas himself, and held the Court and all in it to be utterly given over to Satan, an opinion not without some warrant, had he observed any moderation in advancing it.
Why, it was but the other day, the police were sent to disperse a crowd which had gathered round the fanatic, Sergius Thord; only the people had sufficient sense to disperse themselves. A street-preacher or woman ranter is like a cheap- jack or a dispenser of quack medicines; the mob gathers to such persons out of curiosity, not conviction."
When an English mechanic finds out that he has a call to the ministry, we can easily figure the grim ignorant fanatical ranter that comes forth as the result.
He now forsook the company of the profane and licentious, and sought that of a poor man who had the reputation of piety, but, to his grief, he found him "a devilish ranter, given up to all manner of uncleanness; he would laugh at all exhortations to sobriety, and deny that there was a God, an angel, or a spirit."
In the Church of England there has never been a time when the enthusiast has not been treated as a very unsafe man. Rome has found a place for the dreamiest mystic or the noisiest ranter found a place and found a sphere of useful labour.
Rough lads from the upland farms, shop-boys, mill-hands, strained forward, listening, thirsting, responding to every word. Redemption Salvation the deliverance of the soul from itself thither all religion comes at last, whether for the ranter or the philosopher.
And it was an open air ranter, not a clergyman or unobtrusive godly man, that made him exclaim: "Would that my life had been like his even like that man's." Then the Gypsy reminded him of "the wind on the heath" and the boxing gloves. Southey apparently could not help him to the Foreign Office. The only opening that can have seemed possible to him was literature.
The excitement was almost more than I could bear; I turned away, waiting for the tremendous concussion; I heard awful curses from the men, the cowardly shouting of "Roaring John," the blasphemies of "Dick the Ranter." I knew that Black alone was calm; and at the last I fixed my eyes upon him when the head of the torpedo's foam was not thirty yards away from us.
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