Sir Thomas Browne has had many admirers, and his greatest admirers are to be found among our foremost 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 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