The Religio Medici. 151 various proportions, as the naturalist or man of science, the archæologist or scholar, and the meditative and speculative philosopher. In some of the works one of the characters predominates; in some, two of the characters predominate in combination. It will serve our purpose best to glance, first, at his Religio Medici, by itself; then to group together his Vulgar Errors, his Urn-Burial, his Garden of Cyrus, and his Miscellany Tracts, as exhibiting him mainly as a naturalist and an archæologist; and lastly, to glance at his Christian Morals. I. The Religio Medici. As this first work of the author was written in the solitude of the remote country parish where he was practising before he came to Norwich, and when, he tells us, he had hardly a single good book by him, the meditative and speculative element predominates in it over the scientific and the archæological. It is seasoned, indeed, with scholarly allusions and recollections of his reading; but, in the main, it is a work drawn out of the author's spiritual ruminations with himself. For this reason, though the earliest of his writings, it is, in some respects, the most characteristic and important. With all allowance for farther development as his experience increased and his mind grew firmer, we have here the man at his deepest; and, indeed, the germs of most of his subsequent writings are to be found here. The work is a kind of philosophic autobiography, or definition, for personal purposes, of the author's faith, both theological and ethical, up to his thirtieth year, so far as he could then formulate and register it. The idea of such a register, to be drawn up by a man for his own use, is one that might be repeated and made permanent. In the present day, for example, when the complaint is that we are all floating in a sea of scepticism, that the age is one of intellectual anarchy, that there is no faith, that even among minds naturally earnest there is no adequate compact and organisation of common beliefs, might it not be a step in the right direction if those conscious sceptics who are wailing this state of things as regards themselves, were individually, each for himself, to draw out an honest list, not of things which he did not believe, but of things which he had no doubt about, and the truth of which he found it as impossible to deny as to leap off his own shadow? In many cases, the list, alas! might be meagre, and the dogmas contained in it might not have much look of theological promise in them; still, were the list but to contain a few distinct statements of things actually believed, it would be a beginning. The man would then know on what extent of solid flooring he walked, or whether he had anything that could be called a flooring at all, or was blown about in sheer vacancy, or stood poised on the pole of a single indubitability; and though, if he had a supposed flooring, parts of it might afterwards give way, yet parts of it might remain, and new parts might from time to time be added. For, after all, a man's faith consists of those things which he has no doubt about, of whatever nature they are, and whether they are numerous or few. And then, could a sufficient number of the sceptics act in concert, each drawing out a list of his own indubitabilities to be compared with the similar lists of others, it might turn out that a tolerable number of indubitabilities was common to all; and, on this basis, with due architectonic skill, it might be possible to rear the beginnings of that much desired institution, the Church of the future! The objection made to any such procedure would be the general objection made against the mental habit of introspection. As it is not necessary to a man's living healthily, in a physical sense, that he should be able to describe his entrails, so, it is said, it is not necessary to efficient moral and spiritual life that a man should be able to define his beliefs; but, on the contrary, any persistent attempt to do so will operate injuriously on the beliefs themselves, by hardening, and, as it were, ossifying, what should be kept soft and vital and throbbing! But, surely, to have a knowledge of one's beliefs is not necessarily the same thing as to be always thinking of them; and, as a physician's knowledge of his own anatomy does not in fact interfere with his bodily health and spontaneity, why may not a man come to an understanding with himself as to the number and precise shape of his spiritual and moral beliefs, without taking harm from it? True, the comparative uncertainty and complexity of matters intellectual as contrasted with matters physical, makes a difference; but, were it not a pitiful thing for a man to live on, knowing that he must either be acting on principles or be a thing of mere rhetoric and sensibility, and yet never care to ascertain which was the case, and, if he had principles, what they were? So, at least, thought Sir Thomas Browne. While yet a young man, he resolved to come to an understanding with himself in writing as to the nature and extent of his religious faith. Trudging on foot, or riding on horseback, along miry country roads in Yorkshire, often at night when the stars were shining over fields and hedges, and he had just come from the bed of some dying patient, his thoughts would become solemn; the passing moment, the road, the glimmering fields, and his own moving body advancing homeward, would start before his inner vision as some old and remembered phantasmagory rather than a present fact; and, as the tears rose at the sense that so it would be soon when the farther home had been reached and the earth knew him no more, the The Religio Medici. 153 need would be felt for some great imagination solving the mystery, making all time one, and connecting these lowly fields with those unchanging stars. In such moods he would interrogate himself as to what he really did believe; the Christianity of his countrymen would supply the forms and matter of his queries; and on one main article after another he would round his thoughts into some approach to conclusion. And, then, when he came home, where no wife awaited him, and still self was his society, it would be his plan to write down these conclusions or these approaches to conclusion, in order that, more distinctly facing him, he might grasp them more abidingly. As he wrote, however, it was not only the main often-ruminated and always-returning conclusions that were set down; fancy and rhetoric had their play at the moment; partly he led the pen, and partly the pen led him; the stem put forth branches and foliage, and truths previously determined as fundamental, were developed in the act of expressing them into related but less certain intellectual minutiæ. Thus in the course of some winter, or of a few successive winters, was produced the Religio Medici. The book opens with a profession, in general, of the author's belief in Christianity, not merely as the religion in which he had been born, but as a religion which he had examined for himself. His Christianity, however, he declares to be of a liberal cast. He is not so wedded to the peculiarities of any Christian church or sect, as to feel out of his element in the society of any other; and even those ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church which his reason disowns or could dispense with, excite nothing in him but reverence. For himself, however, the Reformed Church of. England is that whose every part is most squared to his conscience and framed to his particular devotion. Where the Scripture is silent, the Church is his text; and in matters indifferent he follows the rules of his own reason. 'In philosophy,' he says, where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself; but in divinity I love to keep the road, and, though not in an implicit, yet an humble faith, follow 'the great wheel of the Church.' In his greener youth he confesses to have entertained several heresies, all of such a kind, he says, and of so old a date, that they never could have reappeared in any but such an extravagant and irregular head' as his. 7 One of these heresies was the old Arabian heresy that the soul slept in total unconsciousness between the death of the body and the resurrection. Another was the heresy of Origen that God's vengeance on sinners would not last for ever, but that the souls of the damned would ultimately be recovered by mercy. A third, to which he confesses to have still some lingering attach ment, though only to the extent of a wish that it had been true, was the Catholic heresy of the efficacy of prayers for the dead. He could hardly hear a bell toll for a dead friend without an orison for his soul! But these heresies he had overcome; and as for those wingy mysteries in divinity,' those deep and dark problems, and extreme subtleties, upon which men had usually split into heresies, they had never been any difficulty to him! On this point he has a very characteristic passage: 6 'Methinks, there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery, 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, Incarnation, and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learnt of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est.' I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith but persuasion. Some believe the better for seeing Christ's sepulchre ; and, when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now, certainly, I bless myself and am thankful that I lived not in the days of miracles, that I never saw Christ nor his disciples. I would not have been one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christ's patients on whom he wrought his wonders: then had my faith been thrust upon me, nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe and saw not. . . . 'Tis true, there is an edge in all firm belief, and, with an easy metaphor, we may say, the sword of faith; but, in these obscurities, I rather use it in the adjunct the apostle gives it—a buckler-under which I conceive a wary combatant may lie invulnerable. Since I was of understanding 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, without a rigid definition, in an easy and Platonic description. That allegorical description of Hermes [ Sphæra cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi'] pleaseth me beyond all the metaphysical definitions of divines. Where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy: I had as lief you tell me that anima est angelus hominis, est corpus Dei, as EVTEλEXEIa-that lux est umbra Dei as actus perspicui. Where there is an obscurity too deep for our reason, 'tis good to sit down with a description, periphrasis, or adumbration; for, by acquainting our reason how unable it is to display the visible and obvious effects of nature, it becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtleties of faith; and thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop unto the lure of faith.' It is his delight, he continues, to contemplate, in his solitude, the omnipresence, the wisdom, and the eternity of God, and to wilder himself with the thought of the last, and its harmony with The Religio Medici. 155 the mystery of the Trinity. In connexion with the doctrine of the Trinity he confesses to an admiration of the Pythagorean notion of the magic of numbers, and to a sympathy with the philosophy of Hermes, according to which the whole face of nature was to be considered as covered with hieroglyphics, analogies, and stenographic signs of truths everlasting and invisible. It was the business of man to catch these hints and to pursue them to the uttermost; nor could such research ever be carried too far, for God made the world to be inhabited by beasts, but to be studied by man. In the causes, nature, and affections of the eclipses of the sun and moon, there is most excellent speculation; but to profound farther and to contemplate why his pro'vidence hath so disposed and ordered their motions in that vast 'circle as to conjoin and obscure each other, is a sweeter piece of reason, and a diviner point of philosophy. Perhaps the ancients and the heathen sages, who had not God's other book of Scripture out of which to derive their divinity, were more skilled in joining and reading those mystical characters of which the book of Nature is full, than we who have not to grope among such hieroglyphics, nor to suck our instruction from the flowers. Providence, also, is full of instruction to the scholar, and there is a divinity in natural coincidences. As regards the book of Scripture vouchsafed for clearer light to the Christian, apparent contradictions and difficulties did not disturb him. He believes the Bible to be the word of God; but, were it of man, he should still think it the most singular and superlative piece that hath been extant since the creation.' It was the best book in the world; and, indeed, the world had infinitely too many books, and would be far better off if a general synod were to reduce them all to a few solid authors and burn the rest! Of all sects he was most opposed to the Jews, because of their obstinacy in refusing the whole Scriptures. But even they must not be persecuted, for 'persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion! For himself, though no one less feared death, he would not die for a ceremony; he would connive at matters wherein there were not manifest impieties; and, though he thought the martyrs to fundamental truths of religion the noblest of men, he pitied the poor bishop who made an unnecessary fuss about the Antipodes. The continuance of miracles in the world did not seem impossible to him, though almost all alleged miracles were probably but pia fraudes. He wondered at those who could question the existence of spirits; and, for himself, he believed in spirits both good and bad, in the operation of the Devil or witchcraft, and in noble essences making courteous revelations to man. There might even be, in addition to these divided spirits, a common or uni |