Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici | Page 9

Ezekiel, but in an ocular and visible object, the types of his resurrection.' Nor can he dedicate his _Urn-Burial_ to his worthy and honoured friend without counselling him to 'run up his thoughts upon the Ancient of Days, the antiquary's truest object'; so continually does Browne's imagination in all his books pierce into and terminate upon Divine Persons and upon unseen and eternal things. In his rare imagination, Sir Thomas Browne had the original root of a truly refining, ennobling, and sanctifying faith planted in his heart by the hand of Nature herself. No man, indeed, in the nature of things, can be a believing Christian man without imagination. A believing and a heavenly-minded man may have a fine imagination without knowing that he has it. He may have it without knowing or admitting the name of it. He may have it, and may be constantly employing it, without being taught, and without discovering, how most nobly and most fruitfully to employ it. Not Shakespeare; not Milton; not Scott: scarcely Tennyson or Browning themselves, knew how best to employ their imagination. Only Dante and Behmen of all the foremost sons of men. Only they two turned all their splendid and unapproached imagination to the true, and full, and final Objects of Christian faith. Only to them two was their magnificent imagination the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. And though the Religio does not at all rank with the Commedia and the Aurora, at the same time, it springs up from, and it is strengthened and sweetened by the same intellectual and spiritual root. Up through all 'the weeds and tares of his brain,' as Sir Thomas himself calls them, his imagination and his faith shot, and sprang, and spread, till they covered with their finest fruits his whole mind, and heart, and life.
Sir Thomas Browne was a noble illustration of Bacon's noble law. For Sir Thomas carried all his studies, experiments, and operations to such a depth in his own mind, and heart, and imagination, that he was able to testify to all his fellow-physicians that he who studies man and medicine deeply enough will meet with as many intellectual, and scientific, and religious adventures every day as any traveller will meet with in Africa itself. As a living man of genius in the medical profession, Dr. George Gould, has it in that wonderful Behmenite and Darwinian book of his, The Meaning and the Method of Life, 'A healing and a knitting wound,' he argues, 'is quite as good a proof of God as a sensible mind would desire.' This was Sir Thomas Browne's wise, and deep, and devout mind in all parts of his professional and personal life. And he was man enough, and a man of true science and of true religion enough, to warn his brethren against those 'academical reservations' to which their strong intellectual and professional pride, and their too weak faith and courage, continually tempted them. Nor has he, for his part, any clinical reservations in religion either, as so many of his brethren have. 'I cannot go to cure the body of my patient,' he protests, 'but I forget my profession and call unto God for his soul.' To call Sir Thomas Browne sceptical, as has been a caprice and a fashion among his merely literary admirers: and to say it, till it is taken for granted, that he is an English Montaigne: all that is an abuse of language. It is, to all but a small and select circle of writers and readers, utterly misleading and essentially untrue. And, besides, it is right in the teeth of Sir Thomas's own emphatic, and repeated, and indignant denial and repudiation of Montaigne. Montaigne, with all his fascinations for literary men, and they are great; and with all his services to them, and they are not small; is both an immoral and an unbelieving writer. Whereas, Sir Thomas Browne never wrote a single line, even in his greenest studies, that on his deathbed he desired to blot out. A purer, a humbler, a more devout and detached hand never put English pen to paper than was the hand of Sir Thomas Browne. And, if ever in his greener days he had a doubt about any truth of natural or of revealed religion, he tells us that he had fought down every such doubt in his closet and on his knees.
I will not profanely paraphrase, or in any way water down the strong words in which Sir Thomas Browne writes to himself in his secret papers about prayer. All that has been said about this very remarkable man only makes what we are now to read all the more remarkable and memorable. All Sir Thomas Browne's readers owe an immense