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Fanatics

Charles Buck Theological Dictionary

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Charles Buck Dictionary
• Fanatics
1910 New Catholic Dictionary
• Fanatic
Webster Dictionary
• Fanatism
• Fanatical
• Fanatic

Wild enthusiasts, visionary persons, who pretend to revelation and inspiration. The ancients called those fanatici who passed their times in temples (fana;) and being often seized with a kind of enthusiasm, as if inspired by the Divinity, showed wild and antic gestures, cutting and slashing their arms with knives, shaking the head, &c. Hence the word was applied among us to the Anabaptists, Quakers, &c. at their first rise, and is now an epithet given to modern prophets, enthusiasts, &c.; and we believe unjustly to those who possess a considerable degree of zeal and fervency of devotion.