Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse.

  • Edmund Gosse
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    what the majority of Christians believed; nay, he insisted upon doing so. But the details of dogma did not interest him, and he dealt in generalities because his mind was not equipped for theological disputation. If Browne was a heretic, as some declared, there certainly never lived a heretic more anxious to be orthodox or less partial to his own errors. But it is with a definition of faith, and with a visible determination to be subdued to it, that the main argument of Leligio Medici closes. When we come to think what it is that the whole treatise has amounted to, we perceive that it has been both evasive and para- doxical. Evasive, because the real object of the author —apart from his very manifest artistic object, to write a beautiful book—has been to present an apology for carrying on a secular calling. That is what Browne, a doctor in general country practice, has wanted to do, but he has chosen to do it evasively, by discussing a great number of semi-theological points, many of which, it is obvious, really interest him very little. And paradoxically, because the whole treatise, in its golden haziness, like a meadow flooded with slanting light at sunset, gives us an idea that the author really loved paradox for its own sake, and that his extraordinary leaps and somersaults are made out of solemn freakish- ness, to amuse his own gay and gentle nature, and to dazzle the ingenuous reader a little. We must never forget that Religio Medica was written “for my private exercise and satisfaction.” It had no purpose of education or edification ; it was a sort of diary of the author’s soul, a note-book into which he jotted his spiritual symptoms. Somebody seems to have reminded him that he had
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