Hooker's masterly Fifth Book: as also about his evangelical and immortal
_Discourse of Justification_! A well-read friend of mine suddenly said
to me in a conversation we were holding the other day about Sir Thomas
Browne's religion, 'The truth is,' he said, 'Browne was nothing short of
a Pelagian, and that largely accounts for his popularity on the Continent
of his day.' That was a stroke of true criticism. And Sir Thomas's own
Tertullian has the same thing in that most comprehensive and conclusive
phrase of his: _anima naturaliter Christiana_. But, that being admitted
and accepted, which must be admitted and accepted in the interests of the
truth; this also must still more be proclaimed, admitted, and accepted,
that when he comes to God, and to Holy Scripture, and to prayer, and to
immortality, Sir Thomas Browne is a very prince of believers. In all
these great regions of things Sir Thomas Browne's faith has a height and
a depth, a strength and a sweep, that all combine together to place him
in the very foremost rank of our most classical writers on natural and
revealed religion. Hooker himself in some respects gives place to Sir
Thomas Browne.

'I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and
the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind: and
therefore, God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because His
ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy
inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's
minds about to religion.' The old proverb, _Ubi tres medici, duo athei_,
cast an opprobrium on the medical profession that can never have been
just. At the same time, that proverb may be taken as proving how little
true philosophy there must have been at one time among the medical men of
Europe. Whereas, in Sir Thomas Browne at any rate, his philosophy was of
such a depth that to him, as he repeatedly tells us, atheism, or anything
like atheism, had always been absolutely impossible. 'Mine is that