Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici | Page 8

men. He has had Samuel Johnson
among his greatest admirers, and Coleridge, and Carlyle, and Hazlitt,
and Lytton, and Walter Pater, and Leslie Stephen, and Professor
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