interpretation of that experience, generally and by
implication; only, with a marked reserve as to religious particulars,
both of thought and language, out of a real reverence or awe, as proper
only for a special place. Such is the lay religion, as we may find it
in Addison, in Gray, in Thackeray; and there is something of a
concession--a concession, on second thoughts--about it. Browne's
Religio Medici is designed as the expression of a mind [137] more
difficult of belief than that of the mere "layman," as above described;
it is meant for the religion of the man of science. Actually, it is
something less to the point, in any balancing of the religious against
the worldly view of things, than the religion of the layman, as just
now defined. For Browne, in spite of his profession of boisterous
doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing
of the character of a concession. He holds that there has never
existed an atheist. Not that he is credulous; but that his religion is
only the correlative of himself, his peculiar character and education,
a religion of manifold association. For him, the wonders of religion,
its supernatural events or agencies, are almost natural facts or
processes. "Even in this material fabric, the spirits walk as freely
exempt from the affection of time, place and motion, as beyond the
extremest circumference." Had not Divine interference designed to
raise the dead, nature herself is in act to do it--to lead out the
"incinerated soul" from the retreats of her dark laboratory. Certainly
Browne has not, like Pascal, made the "great resolution," by the
apprehension that it is just in the contrast of the moral world to the
world with which science deals that religion finds its proper basis.
It is from the homelessness of the world which science analyses so
victoriously, its dark unspirituality, wherein the soul he is conscious
of seems such a [138] stranger, that Pascal "turns again to his rest,"
in the conception of a world of wholly reasonable and moral agencies.
For Browne, on the contrary, the light is full, design everywhere
obvious, its conclusion easy to draw, all small and great things marked
clearly with the signature of the "Word." The adhesion, the difficult
adhesion, of men such as Pascal, is an immense contribution to
religious controversy; the concession, again, of a man like Addison, of
great significance there. But in the adhesion of Browne, in spite of
hi