Christiana.

* * * * *

The Religio Medici was Sir Thomas Browne’s first book, and it remains by far his best book.  His other books acquire their value and take their rank just according to the degree of their ‘affinity’ to the Religio Medici.  Sir Thomas Browne is at his best when he is most alone with himself.  There is no subject that interests him so much as Sir Thomas Browne.  And if you will forget yourself in Sir Thomas Browne, and in his conversations which he holds with himself, you will find a rare and an ever fresh delight in the Religio Medici.  Sir Thomas is one of the greatest egotists of literature—to use a necessary but an unpopular and a misleading epithet.  Hazlitt has it that there have only been but three perfect, absolute, and unapproached egotists in all literature—Cellini, Montaigne, and Wordsworth.  But why that fine critic leaves out Sir

Thomas Browne, I cannot understand or accept.  I always turn to Sir Thomas Browne, far more than to either of Hazlitt’s canonised three, when I want to read what a great man has to tell me about himself: and in this case both a great and a good and a Christian man.  And thus, whatever modification and adaptation may have been made in this masterpiece of his, in view of its publication, and after it was first published, the original essence, most genuine substance, and unique style of the book were all intended for its author’s peculiar heart and private eye alone.  And thus it is that we have a work of a simplicity and a sincerity that would have been impossible had its author in any part of his book sat down to compose for the public.  Sir Thomas Browne lived so much within himself, that he was both secret writer and sole reader to himself.  His great book is ‘a private exercise directed solely,’ as he himself says, ‘to himself: it is a memorial addressed to himself rather than an example or a rule directed to any other man.’  And it is only he who opens the Religio Medici honestly and easily believing that, and glad to have such a secret and sincere and devout book in his hand,—it is only he who will truly enjoy the book, and who will

gather the same gain out of it that its author enjoyed and gained out of it himself.  In short, the properly prepared and absolutely ingenuous reader of the Religio Medici must be a second Thomas Browne himself.

‘I am a medical man,’ says Sir Thomas, in introducing himself to us, ‘and this is my religion.  I am a physician, and this is my faith, and my morals, and my whole true and proper life.  The scandal of my profession, the natural course of my studies, and the indifference of my behaviour and discourse in matters of religion, might persuade the world that I had no religion at all.  And yet, in despite of all that, I dare, without usurpation, assume the honourable style of a Christian.’  And if ever any man was a truly catholic Christian, it was surely Sir Thomas Browne.  He does not unchurch or ostracise any other man.  He does not stand at diameter and sword’s point with any other man; no, not even with his enemy.  He has never been able to alienate or exasperate himself from any man whatsoever because of a difference of an opinion.  He has never been angry with any man because his judgment in matters of religion did not agree with his.  In short he has no genius for disputes about religion; and he has often

felt it to be his best wisdom to decline all such disputes.  When his head was greener than it now is, he had a tendency to two or three errors in religion, of which he proceeds to set down the spiritual history.  But at no time did he ever maintain his own opinions with pertinacity: far less to inveigle or entangle any other man’s faith; and thus they soon died out, since they were only bare errors and single lapses of his understanding, without a joint depravity of his will.  The truth to Sir Thomas Browne about all revealed religion is this, which he sets forth in a deservedly famous passage:—‘Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in revealed religion for an active faith.  I love to lose myself in a mystery, and to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!  ’Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection.  I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est.  I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for anything else is not faith but persuasion.  I bless myself, and am thankful that I never saw Christ nor His disciples.  For then had my faith been

thrust upon me; nor should I have enjoyed that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe and saw not.  They only had the advantage of a noble and a bold faith who lived before the coming of Christ; and who, upon obscure prophecies and mystical types, could raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities.  And since I was of understanding enough to know that we know nothing, my reason hath been more pliable to the will of faith.  I am now content to understand a mystery in an easy and Platonic way, and without a demonstration and a rigid definition; and thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop unto the lure of faith.’  The unreclaimed reader who is not already allured by these specimens need go no further in Sir Thomas Browne’s autobiographic book.  But he who feels the grace and the truth, the power and the sweetness and the beauty of such writing, will be glad to know that the whole Religio is full of such things, and that all this author’s religious and moral writings partake of the same truly Apostolic and truly Platonic character.  In this noble temper, with the richest mind, and clothed in a style that entrances and captivates us, Sir Thomas proceeds to set forth his doctrine and experience

of God; of God’s providence; of Holy Scripture; of nature and man; of miracles and oracles; of the Holy Ghost and holy angels; of death; and of heaven and hell.  And, especially, and with great fulness, and victoriousness, and conclusiveness, he deals with death.  We sometimes amuse ourselves by making a selection of the two or three books that we would take with us to prison or to a desert island.  And one dying man here and another there has already selected and set aside the proper and most suitable books for his own special deathbed.  ‘Read where I first cast my anchor,’ said John Knox to his wife, sitting weeping at his bedside.  At which she opened and read in the Gospel of John.  Sir Thomas Browne is neither more nor less than the very prose-laureate of death.  He writes as no other man has ever written about death.  Death is everywhere in all Sir Thomas Browne’s books.  And yet it may be said of them all, that, like heaven itself, there is no death there.  Death is swallowed up in Sir Thomas Browne’s defiant faith that cannot, even in death, get difficulties and impossibilities enough to exercise itself upon.  O death, where is thy sting to Rutherford, and Bunyan, and Baxter, and Browne; and to those who diet their imaginations

and their hearts day and night at such heavenly tables!  But, if only to see how great and good men differ, Spinoza has this proposition and demonstration that a ‘free man thinks of nothing less than of death.’  Browne was a free man, but he thought of nothing more than of death.  He was of Dante’s mind—

The arrow seen beforehand slacks its flight.