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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.
His contributions to "evidence," in the Religio Medici, for instance, hardly tell, because he writes out of view of a really philosophical criticism. What does tell in him, in this direction, is the witness he brings to men's instinct of survival the "intimations of immortality," as Wordsworth terms them, which were natural with him in surprising force.
Sir Thomas Browne, though he had written an exposure of "Vulgar Errors," testified in court to his faith in the possibility of witchcraft. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his "Observations on the Religio Medici," takes, perhaps, as advanced ground as any, when he says: "Neither do I deny there are witches; I only reserve my assent till I meet with stronger motives to carry it."
If he's not an aristocrat to the finger tips, I'll give up all my work, turn Catholic, and go into a nunnery which will distress you exceedingly. And then" she waved a plump hand "and then, as I've mentioned before, he reads the Religio Medici. The commonplace, vulgar young man of to-day no more reads Sir Thomas Browne than he reads Tertullian or the Upanishads."
'Once loosen a man's religio, once fling away the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which have made him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain. How often he has heard it said! How often he has endorsed it! Is it true? His heart grows cold within him. What good man can ever contemplate with patience the loss not of friends or happiness, but of his best self?
The Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne shows similar tendencies. Preliminary Survey.% In the line of development from the speculations of Nicolas of Cusa to the establishment of the English philosophy of nature, of religion, and of the state by Bacon, Herbert, and Hobbes, and to the physics of Galileo, modern ideas have manifested themselves with increasing clearness and freedom.
"A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music." Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not common until the first quarter of the next century. He says in the Religio Medici:
It was the same eternal story, the same terrible two-edged weapon, "Cujus reggio ejus religio," found in the arsenal of the first Reformers, and in every politico- religious arsenal of history. "By an eternal decree of God," said Gomarus in accordance with Calvin, "it has been fixed who are to be saved and who damned.
He was a mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, Religio Medici, published in 1642, and Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns dug up in Norfolk.
For this is but to dash the first table against the second; and so to consider men as Christians, as we forget that they are men. Lucretius the poet, when he beheld the act of Agamemnon, that could endure the sacrificing of his own daughter, exclaimed: Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum. What would he have said, if he had known of the massacre in France, or the powder treason of England?
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