Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici | Page 9

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 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