Chapter VIII: Part 8

When Sir Thomas Browne, in the last decade of his life, was asked to furnish data for the writing of his memoirs in Wood's 'Athenæ Oxonienses,' he gave in a letter to his friend Mr. Aubrey in the fewest words his birthplace and the places of his education, his admission as "Socius Honorarius of the College of Physitians in London," the date of his being knighted, and the titles of the four books or tracts which he had printed; and ended with "Have some miscellaneous tracts which may be published."

This account of himself, curter than many an epitaph, and scantier in details than the requirements of a census-taker's blank, may serve, with many other signs that one finds scattered among the pages of this author, to show his rare modesty and effacement of his physical self. He seems, like some other thoughtful and sensitive natures before and since, averse or at least indifferent to being put on record as an eating, digesting, sleeping, and clothes-wearing animal, of that species of which his contemporary Sir Samuel Pepys stands as the classical instance, and which the newspaper interviewer of our own day--that "fellow who would vulgarize the Day of Judgment"--has trained to the most noxious degree of offensiveness.

Sir Thomas felt, undoubtedly, that having admitted that select company--"fit audience though few"--who are students of the 'Religio Medici' to a close intimacy with his highest mental processes and conditions, his "separable accidents," affairs of assimilation and secretion as one may say, were business between himself and his grocer and tailor, his cook and his laundress.

The industrious research of Mr. Simon Wilkin, who in 1836 produced the completest edition (William Pickering, London) of the literary remains of Sir Thomas Browne, has gathered from all sources--his own note-books, domestic and friendly correspondence, allusions of contemporary writers and the works of subsequent biographers--all that we are likely, this side of Paradise, to know of this great scholar and admirable man.

The main facts of his life are as follows. He was born in the Parish of St. Michael's Cheap, in London, on the 19th of October, 1605 (the year of the Gunpowder Plot). His father, as is apologetically admitted by a granddaughter, Mrs. Littleton, "was a tradesman, a mercer, though a gentleman of a good family in Cheshire" (_generosa familia_, says Sir Thomas's own epitaph). That he was the parent of his son's temperament, a devout man with a leaning toward mysticism in religion, is shown by the charming story Mrs. Littleton tells of him, exhibiting traits worthy of the best ages of faith, and more to be expected in the father of a mediæval saint than in a prosperous Cheapside mercer, whose son was to be one of the most learned and philosophical physicians of the age of Harvey and Sydenham:--"His father used to open his breast when he was asleep and kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the Holy Ghost would take possession there." Clearly, it was with reverent memory of this good man that Sir Thomas, near the close of his own long life, wrote:--"Among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up one hand unto heaven that thou wert born of honest parents; that modesty, humility, patience, and veracity lay in the same egg and came into the world with thee."

This loving father, of whom one would fain know more, died in the early childhood of his son Thomas. He left a handsome estate of £9,000, and a widow not wholly inconsolable with her third portion and a not unduly deferred second marriage to a titled gentleman, Sir Thomas Button,--a knight so scantily and at the same time so variously described, as "a worthy person who had great places," and "a bad member" of "mutinous and unworthy carriage," that one is content to leave him as a problematical character.

The boy Thomas Browne being left to the care of guardians, his estate was despoiled, though to what extent does not appear; nor can it be considered greatly deplorable, since it did not prevent his early schooling at that ancient and noble foundation of Winchester, nor in 1623 his entrance into Pembroke College, Oxford, and in due course his graduation in 1626 as bachelor of arts. With what special assistance or direction he began his studies in medical science, cannot now be ascertained; but after taking his degree of master of arts in 1629, he practiced physic for about two years in some uncertain place in Oxfordshire. He then began a course of travel, unusually extensive for that day. His stepfather upon occasion of his official duties under the government "shewed him all Ireland in some visitation of the forts and castles." It is improbable that Ireland at that time long detained a traveler essentially literary in his tastes. Browne betook himself to France and Italy, where he appears to have spent about two years, residing at Montpellier and Padua, then great centres of medical learning, with students drawn from most parts of Christendom. Returning homeward through Holland, he received the degree of doctor of medicine from the University of Leyden in 1633, and settled in practice at Halifax, England.

At this time--favored probably by the leisure which largely attends the beginning of a medical career, but which is rarely so laudably or productively employed,--he wrote the treatise 'Religio Medici,' which more than any other of his works has established his fame and won the affectionate admiration of thoughtful readers. This production was not printed until seven years later, although some unauthorized manuscript copies, more or less faulty, were in circulation. When in 1642 "it arrived in a most depraved copy at the press," Browne felt it necessary to vindicate himself by publishing a correct edition, although, he protests, its original "intention was not publick: and being a private exercise directed to myself, what is delivered therein was rather a memorial unto me than an example or rule unto any other."

In 1636 he removed to Norwich and permanently established himself there in the practice of physic. There in 1641 he married Dorothy Mileham, a lady of good family in Norfolk; thereby not only improving his social connections, but securing a wife "of such symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." Such at least was the view of an intimate friend of more than forty years, Rev. John Whitefoot, in the 'Minutes' which, at the request of the widow, he drew up after Sir Thomas's death, and which contain the most that is known of his personal appearance and manners. Evidently the marriage was a happy one for forty-one years, when the Lady Dorothy was left _mæstissima conjux_, as her husband's stately epitaph, rich with many an _issimus_, declares. Twelve children were born of it; and though only four of them survived their parents, such mortality in carefully tended and well-circumstanced families was less remarkable than it would be now, when two centuries more of progress in medical science have added security and length to human life.

The good mother--had she not endeared herself to the modern reader by the affectionate gentleness and the quaint glimpses of domestic life that her family letters reveal--would be irresistible by the ingeniously bad spelling in which she reveled, transgressing even the wide limits then allowed to feminine heterography.

It is noteworthy that Dr. Browne's professional prosperity was not impaired by the suspicion which early attached to him, and soon deepened into conviction, that he was addicted to literary pursuits. He was in high repute as a physician. His practice was extensive, and he was diligent in it, as also in those works of literature and scientific investigation which occupied all "snatches of time," he says, "as medical vacations and the fruitless importunity of uroscopy would permit." His large family was liberally reared; his hospitality and his charities were ample.

In 1646 he printed his second book, the largest and most operose of all his productions: the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors' the work evidently of the _horæ subsecivæ_ of many years. In 1658 he gave to the public two smaller but important and most characteristic works, 'Hydriotaphia' and 'The Garden of Cyrus.' Beside these publications he left many manuscripts which appeared posthumously; the most important of them, for its size and general interest, being 'Christian Morals.'

When Sir Thomas's long life drew to its close, it was with all the blessings "which should accompany old age." His domestic life had been one of felicity. His eldest and only surviving son, Edward Browne, had become a scholar after his father's own heart; and though not inheriting his genius, was already renowned in London, one of the physicians to the King, and in a way to become, as afterward he did, President of the College of Physicians. All his daughters who had attained womanhood had been well married. He lived in the society of the honorable and learned, and had received from the King the honor of knighthood[1].

[Footnote 1: As for this business of the knighting, one hesitates fully to adopt Dr. Johnson's remark that Charles II. "had skill to discover excellence and virtue to reward it, at least with such honorary distinctions as cost him nothing." 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 fact is that the King on his visit to Norwich, looking about for somebody to knight, intended, as usual on such occasions, to confer the title on the mayor of the city; but this functionary,--some brewer or grocer perhaps, of whom nothing else than this incident is recorded,--declined the honor, whereupon the gap was stopped with Dr. Browne.]

Mr. John Evelyn, carrying out a long and cherished plan of seeing one whom he had known and admired by his writings, visited him at Norwich in 1671. He found Sir Thomas among fit surroundings, "his whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities, and that of the best collections, especially medails, books, plants, and natural things[2]." Here we have the right background and accessories for Whitefoot's portrait of the central figure:--

"His complexion and hair ... answerable to his name, his
stature moderate, and habit of body neither fat nor lean but
[Greek: eusarkos;] ... never seen to be transported with
mirth or dejected with sadness; always cheerful, but rarely
merry at any sensible rate; seldom heard to break a jest, and
when he did, ... apt to blush at the levity of it: his
gravity was natural without affectation. His modesty ...
visible in a natural habitual blush, which was increased upon
the least occasion, and oft discovered without any observable
cause.... So free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that
he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse;
though when he was so, it was always singular and never trite
or vulgar."

[Footnote 2: These two distinguished authors were of congenial tastes, and both cultivated the same Latinistic literary diction. Their meeting must have occasioned a copious effusion of those "long-tailed words in osity and ation" which both had so readily at command or made to order. It is regrettable that Evelyn never completed a work entitled 'Elysium Brittannicum' which he planned, and to which Browne contributed a chapter 'Of Coronary Plants.' It would have taken rank with its author's 'Sylva' among English classics.]

A man of character so lofty and self-contained might be expected to leave a life so long, honorable, and beneficent with becoming dignity. Sir Thomas's last sickness, a brief but very painful one, was "endured with exemplary patience founded upon the Christian philosophy," and "with a meek, rational, and religious courage," much to the edification of his friend Whitefoot. One may see even a kind of felicity in his death, falling exactly on the completion of his seventy-seventh year.

He was buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where his monument still claims regard as chief among the _memorabilia_ of that noble sanctuary[3].

[Footnote 3: In the course of repairs, "in August, 1840, his coffin was broken open by a pickaxe; the bones were found in good preservation, the fine auburn hair had not lost its freshness." It is painful to relate that the cranium was removed and placed in the pathological museum of the Norwich Hospital, labeled as "the gift of" some person (name not recalled), whose own cranium is probably an object of interest solely to its present proprietor. "Who knows the fate of his own bones? ... We insult not over their ashes," says Sir Thomas. The curator of the museum feels that he has a clever joke on the dead man, when with a grin he points to a label bearing these words from the 'Hydriotaphia':--"To be knaved out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials."]

At the first appearance of Browne's several publications, they attracted that attention from the learned and thoughtful which they have ever since retained. The 'Religio Medici' was soon translated into several modern languages as well as into Latin, and became the subject of curiously diverse criticism. The book received the distinction of a place in the Roman 'Index Expurgatorius,' while from various points of view its author was regarded as a Romanist, an atheist, a deist, a pantheist, and as bearing the number 666 somewhere about him.

A worthy Quaker, a fellow-townsman, was so impressed by his tone of quietistic mysticism that he felt sure the philosophic doctor was guided by "the inward light," and wrote, sending a godly book, and proposing to clinch his conversion in a personal interview. Such are the perils that environ the man who not only repeats a creed in sincerity, but ventures to do and to utter his own thinking about it.

From Browne's own day to the present time his critics and commentators have been numerous and distinguished; one of the most renowned among them being Dr. Johnson, whose life of the author, prefixed to an edition of the 'Christian Morals' in 1756, is a fine specimen of that facile and effective hack-work of which Johnson was master. In that characteristic way of his, half of patronage, half of reproof, and wholly pedagogical, he summons his subject to the bar of his dialectics, and according to his lights administers justice. He admits that Browne has "great excellencies" and "uncommon sentiments," and that his scholarship and science are admirable, but strongly condemns his style: "It is vigorous, but rugged; it is learned, but pedantic; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure; his tropes are harsh and his combinations uncouth."

Behemoth prescribing rules of locomotion to the swan! By how much would English letters have been the poorer if Browne had learned his art of Johnson!

Notwithstanding such objurgations, some have supposed that the style of Johnson, perhaps without conscious intent, was founded upon that of Browne. A tone of oracular authority, an academic Latinism sometimes disregarding the limitations of the unlearned reader, an elaborate balancing of antitheses in the same period,--these are qualities which the two writers have in common. But the resemblance, such as it is, is skin-deep. Johnson is a polemic by nature, and at his best cogent and triumphant in argument. His thought is carefully kept level with the apprehension of the ordinary reader, while arrayed in a verbal pomp simulating the expression of something weighty and profound. Browne is intuitive and ever averse to controversy, feeling, as he exquisitely says, that "many have too rashly charged the troops of error and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender." Calmly philosophic, he writes for kindred minds, and his concepts satisfying his own intellect, he delivers them with as little passion as an Æolian harp answering the wind, and lingers not for applause or explanation. His being

"Those thoughts that wander through eternity,"

he means that we too shall "have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch."

How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases which for stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and sweetly solemn cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and lack only the mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as verse.

"Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;" "When personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:"--such passages as these, and the whole of the 'Fragment on Mummies,' one can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.

That the 'Religio Medici' was the work of a gentleman before his thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active in a calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, "I have shaken hands with delight [_sc._ by way of parting] in my warm blood and canicular days." So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind. Its frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been compared with Montaigne's: if Montaigne had been graduated after a due education in Purgatory, or if his pedigree had been remotely crossed with a St. Anthony and he had lived to see the _fluctus decumanus_ gathering in the tide of Puritanism, the likeness would have been closer.

"The 'Religio Medici,'" says Coleridge, "is a fine portrait of a handsome man in his best clothes." There is truth in the criticism, and if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who does not feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden, that here is a kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of the outside world, that the handsome man is a true gentleman and a noble friend, and that his best clothes are his every-day wear?

This aloofness of Browne's, which holds him apart "in the still air of delightful studies," is no affectation; it is an innate quality. He thinks his thoughts in his own way, and "the style is the man" never more truly than with him. One of his family letters mentions the execution of Charles I. as a "horrid murther," and another speaks of Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the public eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultuous and heroic period of English history. Not a word shows that Shakespeare was of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the parallels in their thought and feeling and in his, were his contemporaries. Constant and extensive as are his excursions into ancient literature, it is rare for him to make any reference to writers of his own time.

Yet with all his delight in antiquity and reverence for the great names of former ages, he is keen in the quest for new discoveries. His commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute observations regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of our modern school:--"What is the use of dew-claws in dogs?" He does not instantly answer, as a schoolboy in this Darwinian day would, "To carry out an analogy;" but the mere asking of the question sets him ahead of his age. See too his curious inquiries into the left-footedness of parrots and left-handedness of certain monkeys and squirrels. The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician Harvey he quickly appreciates at its true value: "his piece 'De Circul. Sang.,' which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus." And here again a truly surprising suggestion of the great results achieved a century and two centuries later by Jenner and Pasteur--concerning canine madness, "whether it holdeth not better at second than at first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that horse a man, the evil proves less considerable." He is the first to observe and describe that curious product of the decomposition of flesh known to modern chemists as adipocere.

He is full of eager anticipation of the future. "Join sense unto reason," he cries, "and experiment unto speculation, and so give life unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos.... What libraries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new world of knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few ages may joyfully declare."

But acute and active as our author's perceptions were, they did not prevent his sharing the then prevalent theory which assigned to the devil, and to witches who were his ministers, an important part in the economy of the world. This belief affords so easy a solution of some problems otherwise puzzling, that this degenerate age may look back with envy upon those who held it in serene and comfortable possession.

It is to be regretted, however, that the eminent Lord Chief Justice Hale in 1664, presiding at the trial for witchcraft of two women, should have called Dr. Browne, apparently as _amicus curiæ_, to give his view of the fits which were supposed to be the work of the witches. He was clearly of the opinion that the Devil had even more to do with that case than he has with most cases of hysteria; and consequently the witches, it must be said, fared no better in Sir Matthew Hale's court than many of their kind in various parts of Christendom about the same time. But it would be unreasonable for us to hold the ghost of Sir Thomas deeply culpable because, while he showed in most matters an exceptionally enlightened liberality of opinion and practice, in this one particular he declined to deny the scientific dictum of previous ages and the popular belief of his own time.

The mental attitude of reverent belief in its symbolic value, in which this devout philosopher contemplated the material world, is that of many of those who have since helped most to build the structure of Natural Science. The rapturous exclamation of Linnæus, "My God, I think thy thoughts after thee!" comes like an antiphonal response by "the man of flowers" to these passages in the 'Religio Medici':--"This visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric." "Things are really true as they correspond unto God's conception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity unto that intellect, in whose idea they had their first determinations."

FROM THE 'RELIGIO MEDICI'

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which within a few days I should dissent myself. I have no genius to disputes in religion, and have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakness of my patronage. Where we desire to be informed, 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own. Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity: many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal for truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender; 'tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace, than to hazard her on a battle: if therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I do forget them, or at least defer them, till my better settled judgment and more manly reason be able to resolve them; for I perceive every man's own reason is his best Oedipus, and will, upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds wherewith the subtleties of error have enchained our more flexible and tender judgments. In philosophy, where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself: but in divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit, yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle of my own brain: by these means I leave no gap for heresy, schisms, or errors.

As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the _pia mater_ of mine: methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an _O altitudo!_ 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, "Certum est quia impossible est." I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion. Some believe the better for seeing Christ's sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily, I bless myself and am thankful that I live not in the days of miracles, that I never saw Christ nor his disciples; I would not have been one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christ's patients on whom he wrought his wonders: then had my faith been thrust upon me; nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe and saw not. 'Tis an easy and necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath examined: I believe he was dead and buried, and rose again; and desire to see him in his glory, rather than to contemplate him in his cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this much to believe; as we have reason, we owe this faith unto history: they only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before his coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities.

In my solitary and retired imagination,

"Neque enim cum lectulus aut me
Porticus excepit, desum mihi"--

I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate Him and his attributes who is ever with me, especially those two mighty ones, His wisdom and eternity: with the one I recreate, with the other I confound my understanding; for who can speak of eternity without a solecism, or think thereof without an ecstasy? Time we may comprehend: it is but five days older than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world; but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning, to give such an infinite start forward as to conceive an end in an essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, it puts my reason to St. Paul's sanctuary: my philosophy dares not say the angels can do it; God hath not made a creature that can comprehend him; it is a privilege of his own nature: _I am that I am_, was his own definition unto Moses; and it was a short one, to confound mortality, that durst question God or ask him what he was. Indeed he only is; all others have and shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and therefore that terrible term _predestination_, which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to God no prescious determination of our states to come, but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indivisible and all together, the last trump, is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame and the blessed in Abraham's bosom. St. Peter speaks modestly when he saith, a thousand years to God are but as one day; for to speak like a philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years make not to him one moment: what to us is to come, to his eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent point, without succession, parts, flux, or division.

The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works: those highly magnify him whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

"Natura nihil agit frustra," is the only indisputable axiom in philosophy; there are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces: in the most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in the ark, but, having their seeds and principles in the womb of nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is--in these is the wisdom of His hand discovered; out of this rank Solomon chose the object of his admiration; indeed, what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? what wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature--whales, elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the colossi and majestic pieces of her hand: but in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematics; and the civility of these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their Maker. Who admires not Regio-Montanus his fly beyond his eagle, or wonders not more at the operation of two souls in those little bodies, than but one in the trunk of a cedar? I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the cosmography of myself: we carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium, what others labor at in a divided piece and endless volume.

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity: besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature, that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one have discovered him in the other. This was the Scripture and Theology of the heathens: the natural motion of the sun made them more admire him than its supernatural station did the children of Israel; the ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them than in the other all his miracles: surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature. Nor do I so forget God as to adore the name of nature; which I define not, with the schools, to be the principle of motion and rest, but that straight and regular line, that settled and constant course the wisdom of God hath ordained the actions of his creatures, according to their several kinds. To make a revolution every day is the nature of the sun, because of that necessary course which God hath ordained it, from which it cannot swerve but by a faculty from that voice which first did give it motion. Now this course of nature God seldom alters or perverts, but, like an excellent artist, hath so contrived his work that with the selfsame instrument, without a new creation, he may effect his obscurest designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water with a wood, preserveth the creatures in the ark, which the blast of his mouth might have as easily created; for God is like a skillful geometrician, who when more easily, and with one stroke of his compass, he might describe or divide a right line, had yet rather to do this in a circle or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art: yet this rule of his he doth sometimes pervert to acquaint the world with his prerogative, lest the arrogancy of our reason should question his power and conclude he could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument she only is; and therefore to ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honor of the principal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honor of our writing. I hold there is a general beauty in the works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind of species whatsoever: I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express those actions of their inward forms. And having passed that general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was good, that is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity, and is the rule of order and beauty: there is no deformity but in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty, nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts that they become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric. To speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or misshapen but the chaos; wherein, notwithstanding, to speak strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet impregnate by the voice of God; now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants of his providence: art is the perfection of nature: were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos; nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.

I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the library of Alexandria; for my own part, I think there be too many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican, could I, with a few others, recover the perished leaves of Solomon. I would not omit a copy of Enoch's Pillars had they many nearer authors than Josephus, or did not relish somewhat of the fable. Some men have written more than others have spoken: Pineda quotes more authors in one work than are necessary in a whole world. Of those three great inventions in Germany, there are two which are not without their incommodities. It is not a melancholy _utinam_ of my own, but the desires of better heads, that there were a general synod; not to unite the incompatible difference of religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first, in a few and solid authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions of rhapsodies begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.

Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations, and spells are not witches, or, as we term them, magicians. I conceive there is a traditional magic not learned immediately from the Devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having once the secret betrayed, are able, and do empirically practice without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of nature; where actives aptly conjoined to disposed passives will under any master produce their effects. Thus, I think at first a great part of philosophy was witchcraft, which being afterward derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed no more but the honest effects of nature: what invented by us is philosophy, learned from him is magic. We do surely owe the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad angels. I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without an asterisk or annotation: "Ascendens astrum multa revelat quærentibus magnalia naturæ, i.e., opera Dei." I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous revelations of spirits,--for those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth; and therefore believe that those many prodigies and ominous prognostics which forerun the ruins of States, princes, and private persons are the charitable premonitions of good angels, which more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and nature.

Now, besides these particular and divided spirits there may be (for aught I know) an universal and common spirit to the whole world. It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Hermetical philosophers: if there be a common nature that unites and ties the scattered and divided individuals into one species, why may there not be one that unites them all? However, I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part of us: and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty essence which is the life and radical heat of spirits and those essences that know not the virtue of the sun; a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell: this is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity: whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse) 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.

I believe that the whole frame of a beast doth perish, and is left in the same state after death as before it was materialled unto life: that the souls of men know neither contrary nor corruption; that they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by the privilege of their proper natures, and without a miracle; that the souls of the faithful, as they leave earth, take possession of heaven: that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us into mischief, blood, and villainy; instilling and stealing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world: but that those phantasms appear often, and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because those are the dormitories of the dead, where the Devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of his victory in Adam.

This is that dismal conquest we all deplore, that makes us so often cry, "Adam, quid fecisti?" I thank God I have not those strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death: not that I am insensible of the dread and horror thereof; or by raking into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of anatomies, skeletons, or cadaverous reliques, like vespilloes or grave-makers, I am become stupid or have forgot the apprehension of mortality; but that marshaling all the horrors, and contemplating the extremities thereof, I find not anything therein able to daunt the courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian; and therefore am not angry at the error of our first parents, or unwilling to bear a part of this common fate, and like the best of them to die--that is, to cease to breathe, to take a farewell of the elements, to be a kind of nothing for a moment, to be within one instant of a spirit. When I take a full view and circle of myself without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of justice, Death, I do conceive myself the miserablest person extant: were there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moment's breath from me; could the Devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I would not outlive that very thought. I have so abject a conceit of this common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements, I cannot think this to be a man, or to live according to the dignity of humanity. In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace this life, yet in my best meditations do often defy death: I honor any man that contemns it, nor can I highly love any that is afraid of it: this makes me naturally love a soldier, and honor those tattered and contemptible regiments that will die at the command of a sergeant. For a pagan there may be some motives to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma--that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.

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I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel been able to effront or enharden me: yet I have one part of modesty which I have seldom discovered in another, that is (to speak truly) I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof: 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, wife, and children, stand afraid and start at us. The birds and beasts of the field, that before in a natural fear obeyed us, forgetting all allegiance, begin to prey upon us. This very conceit hath in a tempest disposed and left me willing to be swallowed up in the abyss of waters, wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied, without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and none had said, "Quantum mutatus ab illo!" Not that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the worms as any.

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Men commonly set forth the torments of hell by fire and the extremity of corporal afflictions, and describe hell in the same method that Mahomet doth heaven. This indeed makes a noise, and drums in popular ears: but if this be the terrible piece thereof, it is not worthy to stand in diameter with heaven, whose happiness consists in that part that is best able to comprehend it--that immortal essence, that translated divinity and colony of God, the soul. Surely, though we place hell under earth, the Devil's walk and purlieu is about it; men speak too popularly who place it in those flaming mountains which to grosser apprehensions represent hell. The heart of man is the place the Devil dwells in: I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me. There are as many hells as Anaxarchus conceited worlds: there was more than one hell in Magdalen, when there were seven devils, for every devil is an hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture in his own _ubi_, and needs not the misery of circumference to afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can but pity the merciful intention of those hands that do destroy themselves? the Devil, were it in his power, would do the like; which being impossible, his miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute wherein he is impassible, his immortality.

I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place; I have so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that I have almost forgot the idea of hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a perfect hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to complete our afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear God, yet am not afraid of him; his mercies make me ashamed of my sins, before his judgments afraid thereof; these are the forced and secondary method of his wisdom, which he useth but as the last remedy, and upon provocation: a course rather to deter the wicked than incite the virtuous to his worship. I can hardly think there was ever any scared into heaven; they go the fairest way to heaven that would serve God without a hell; other mercenaries, that crouch unto him in fear of hell, though they term themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty.

That which is the cause of my election I hold to be the cause of my salvation, which was the mercy and _beneplacit_ of God, before I was, or the foundation of the world. "Before Abraham was, I am," is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense, if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but Adam--that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod held from all eternity: and in this sense, I say, the world was before the creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.

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Now for that other virtue of charity, without which faith is a mere notion and of no existence, I have ever endeavored to nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination I borrowed from my parents, and regulate it to the written and prescribed laws of charity: and if I hold the true anatomy of myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander: at the sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch: but where I find their actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honor, love, and embrace them in the same degree. I was born in the eighth climate, but seem for to be framed and constellated unto all: I am no plant that will not prosper out of a garden; all places, all airs, make unto me one country; I am in England, everywhere, and under any meridian; I have been shipwrecked, yet am not enemy with the sea or winds; I can study, play or sleep in a tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing: my conscience would give me the lie if I should absolutely detest or hate any essence but the Devil; or so at least abhor anything but that we might come to composition. If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion--the multitude: that numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great beast and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra: it is no breach of charity to call these fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even amongst the gentry, a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these; men in the same level with mechanics, though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and their purses compound for their follies.