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Updated: June 14, 2025
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.
Whoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this Spirit, I dare not say he lives; for truly without this to me there is no heat under the tropic, nor any light though I dwelt in the body of the sun." Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici.
About the year 1634 , he is supposed to have returned to London; and the next year to have written his celebrated treatise, called Religio Medici, "the religion of a physician ," which he declares himself never to have intended for the press, having composed it only for his own exercise and entertainment.
Two winters in the Northern University, with the seamy side of school life left behind, among the kindest of professors Mr. Sellar, Mr. Ferrier, Mr. Shairp in the society of the warden, Mr. Rhoades, and of many dear old friends, are the happiest time in my life. This was true literary leisure, even if it was not too well employed, and the religio loci should be a liberal education in itself.
The states of Holland are as sovereign as the kings of England or Denmark, the electors of Saxony or Brandenburg, the magistrates of Zurich or Basel or other Swiss cantons. "Cujus regio ejus religio." In 1590 there was a compromise under the guidance of Barneveld. It was agreed that an appointing board should be established composed of civil functionaries and church officials in equal numbers.
Perhaps there is no greater want in this age than a full, fair, fearless religio clerici; the men who could write it, dare not; and the men who dare write it, cannot. They say the age is not ripe for it; and if they mean that it would cause violent offence to the potent rulers of fashionable religious dogmatism, they are right.
He invited Catherine, or he was directed to invite her, in the pope's name, for the sake of the general interests of Christendom, to take the vows and enter what was called religio laxa, a state in which she might live unincumbered by obligations except the easy one of chastity, and free from all other restrictions either of habit, diet, or order.
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.
The Religio Medici is a universally recognised English classic. And the Urn-Burial, the Christian Morals, and the Letter to a Friend are all quite worthy to take their stand beside the Religio Medici.
The Pilgrim's Progress, in Standard English Classics, Pocket Classics, etc.; Grace Abounding, in Cassell's National Library. Minor Prose Writers. Wentworth's Selections from Jeremy Taylor; Browne's Religio Medici, Walton's Complete Angler, both in Everyman's Library, Temple Classics, etc.; selections from Taylor, Browne, and Walton in Manly's English Prose, also in Garnett's English Prose.
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