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Updated: June 14, 2025
The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas Browne peacefully writing his Religio Medici amid all the commotions of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the crash of empires. It is not his business to fight.
In Germany, the ecclesiastical princes, with the skilled aid of the Jesuits, thoroughly re-established Catholicism in their own realms, in accordance with the legally recognised principle cujus regio ejus religïo. The young Austrian archduke, Ferdinand of Carinthia, a pupil of the Jesuits, was equally determined in the suppression of Protestantism within his territories.
Cujus regio illius religio. From the beginning his own ecclesiastical policy compelled Luther to sanction the bigamy of the Landgrave Philip of Hesse. In the most violent of his tracts he denounced a miserable German peasantry, and he called upon the nobility to massacre those peasants who had only too faithfully obeyed the provocations of the reformer.
A candid observer of the walk and conversation of this illustrious monarch finds room for doubt that he was an attentive reader or consistent admirer of the 'Religio Medici, or 'Christian Morals'; and though his own personal history might have contributed much to a complete catalogue of Vulgar Errors, Browne's treatise so named did not include divagations from common decency in its scope, and so may have failed to impress the royal mind.
The man of the world will answer, "strifes of words, perverse disputings, curious questions, which do not tend to advance what ought to be the one end of all religion, peace and love. This is what comes of insisting on orthodoxy; putting the whole world into a fever!" Tantum religio potuit, etc., as the Epicurean poet says.
The significance of philosophical and prophetic teaching in religion is a frequent subject of thought in our circles, and now the recent publication of Tennyson's life enables us to say something of the Religio Poetae the idealism which inspired the soul of a nineteenth century poet. The poet's name is not without significance and interest.
And, by-the-bye, with the exception of the fine extravaganza on that subject in "Twelfth Night," I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature; it is a passage in the Religio Medici of Sir T. Brown, and though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects.
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.
He is attempting the impossible; his conception is inappropriate; and, in any case, his technique is unequal to so vast an undertaking. He produces something which may be delicious in detail but is pretty sure to be unsatisfactory as a whole. He fails to fill his space. His work has the vice of Sidney's Arcadia and the Religio Medici: it is good to dip into.
Although it was such a small collection, his book- lover's instinct compelled him to look at it. His eyes fell upon a Religio Medici, and he opened it hastily. On the fly-leaf was written "Mary Leighton, from R. L." He had just time, before its owner entered, to replace it and to muse for an instant.
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