Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici | Page 8

Saintsbury; than whom no one of them all has written better on Browne. And he has had princely editors and annotators in Simon Wilkin, and Dr. Greenhill, and Dr. Lloyd Roberts. I must leave it to those eminent men to speak to you with all their authority about Sir Thomas Browne's ten talents: his unique natural endowments, his universal scholarship, his philosophical depth, 'his melancholy yet affable irony,' his professional and scientific attainments, and his absolutely classical English style. And I shall give myself up, in ending this discourse, to what is of much more importance to him and to us all, than all these things taken together,--for Sir Thomas Browne was a believing man, and a man of unfainting and unrelaxing prayer. At the same time, and assuming, as he does, and that without usurpation, as he says, the style of a Christian, he is in reality a Theist rather than a Christian: he is a moral and a religious writer rather than an evangelical and an experimental writer. And in saying this, I do not forget his confession of his faith. 'But to difference myself nearer,' he says, and 'to draw into a lesser circle, there is no Church whose every part so squares unto my conscience: whose Articles, Constitutions, and Customs seem so consonant unto reason, and as it were framed to my particular Devotion, as this whereof I hold my Belief, the Church of England: to whose faith I am a sworn subject, and therefore in a double Obligation subscribe unto her Articles, and endeavour to observe her Constitutions.' The author of the Religio Medici never writes a line out of joint, or out of tone or temper, with that subscription. At the same time, his very best writings fall far short of the best writings of the Church of England. Pater, in his fine paper, says that 'Sir Thomas Browne is occupied with religion first and last in all he writes, scarcely less so than Hooker himself,' and that is the simple truth. Still, if the whole truth is to be told to those who will not make an unfair use of it, Richard Hooker's religion is the whole Christian religion, in all its height and depth, and grace and truth, and doctrinal and evangelical fulness: all of which can never be said of Sir Thomas Browne. I can well imagine Sir Thomas Browne recreating himself, and that with an immense delectation, over Hooker's superb First Book. How I wish that I could say as much about the central six chapters of Hooker's masterly Fifth Book: as also about his evangelical and immortal Discourse of Justification! A well-read friend of mine suddenly said to me in a conversation we were holding the other day about Sir Thomas Browne's religion, 'The truth is,' he said, 'Browne was nothing short of a Pelagian, and that largely accounts for his popularity on the Continent of his day.' That was a stroke of true criticism. And Sir Thomas's own Tertullian has the same thing in that most comprehensive and conclusive phrase of his: anima naturaliter Christiana. But, that being admitted and accepted, which must be admitted and accepted in the interests of the truth; this also must still more be proclaimed, admitted, and accepted, that when he comes to God, and to Holy Scripture, and to prayer, and to immortality, Sir Thomas Browne is a very prince of believers. In all these great regions of things Sir Thomas Browne's faith has a height and a depth, a strength and a sweep, that all combine together to place him in the very foremost rank of our most classical writers on natural and revealed religion. Hooker himself in some respects gives place to Sir Thomas Browne.
'I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind: and therefore, God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because His ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.' The old proverb, _Ubi tres medici, duo athei_, cast an opprobrium on the medical profession that can never have been just. At the same time, that proverb may be taken as proving how little true philosophy there must have been at one time among the medical men of Europe. Whereas, in Sir Thomas Browne at any rate, his philosophy was of such a depth that to him, as he repeatedly tells us, atheism, or anything like atheism, had always been absolutely impossible. 'Mine is that mystical philosophy, from whence no true scholar becomes an atheist, but from the visible effects of nature, grows up a real divine, and beholds, not in a dream, as