ABSTRACT
This chapter examines William Blake’s enthusiast and antinomian antinomian ideas in the light of social social and political debates in the eighteenth century. Enthusiasts believed the divine spirit within to be the highest authority, for which reason all external authority, whether religious or civil, was largely abandoned. Christopher hill, who cites A. L. Morton in connecting Blake with a Ranter tradition, also shows that antinomian ideas were widespread in popular culture, surfacing in ballads and anti-authoritarian literature which spoke for those who felt slighted by the established Church. The 1650 legislation was repealed with the Toleration Act of 1688, but the Ranter myth continued to haunt public imagination. The republications of Robert Barcley’s alarmist tract The Anarchy of the Ranters, and Other Libertines showed that Ranters served in their role as negative examples of antinomian liberty. All antinomian thinking preserves a special role for Christ as a liberator of humankind from law and sin.
