mystical philosophy, from whence no true scholar becomes an atheist, but
from the visible effects of nature, grows up a real divine, and beholds,
not in a dream, as Ezekiel, but in an ocular and visible object, the
types of his resurrection.' Nor can he dedicate his _Urn-Burial_ to his
worthy and honoured friend without counselling him to 'run up his
thoughts upon the Ancient of Days, the antiquary's truest object'; so
continually does Browne's imagination in all his books pierce into and
terminate upon Divine Persons and upon unseen and eternal things. In his
rare imagination, Sir Thomas Browne had the original root of a truly
refining, ennobling, and sanctifying faith planted in his heart by the
hand of Nature herself. No man, indeed, in the nature of things, can be
a believing Christian man without imagination. A believing and a
heavenly-minded man may have a fine imagination without knowing that he
has it. He may have it without knowing or admitting the name of it. He
may have it, and may be constantly employing it, without being taught,
and without discovering, how most nobly and most fruitfully to employ it.
Not Shakespeare; not Milton; not Scott: scarcely Tennyson or Browning
themselves, knew how best to employ their imagination. Only Dante and
Behmen of all the foremost sons of men. Only they two turned all their
splendid and unapproached imagination to the true, and full, and final
Objects of Christian faith. Only to them two was their magnificent
imagination the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things
not seen. And though the _Religio_ does not at all rank with the
_Commedia_ and the _Aurora_, at the same time, it springs up from, and it
is strengthened and sweetened by the same intellectual and spiritual
root. Up through all 'the weeds and tares of his brain,' as Sir Thomas
himself calls them, his imagination and his faith shot, and sprang, and
spread, till they covered with their finest fruits his whole mind, and
heart, and life.