od of Life_, 'A healing and a knitting wound,' he
argues, 'is quite as good a proof of God as a sensible mind would
desire.' This was Sir Thomas Browne's wise, and deep, and devout mind in
all parts of his professional and personal life. And he was man enough,
and a man of true science and of true religion enough, to warn his
brethren against those 'academical reservations' to which their strong
intellectual and professional pride, and their too weak faith and
courage, continually tempted them. Nor has he, for his part, any
clinical reservations in religion either, as so many of his brethren
have. 'I cannot go to cure the body of my patient,' he protests, 'but I
forget my profession and call unto God for his soul.' To call Sir Thomas
Browne sceptical, as has been a caprice and a fashion among his merely
literary admirers: and to say it, till it is taken for granted, that he
is an English Montaigne: all that is an abuse of language. It is, to all
but a small and select circle of writers and readers, utterly misleading
and essentially untrue. And, besides, it is right in the teeth of Sir
Thomas's own emphatic, and repeated, and indignant denial and repudiation
of Montaigne. Montaigne, with all his fascinations for literary men, and
they are great; and with all his services to them, and they are not
small; is both an immoral and an unbelieving writer. Whereas, Sir Thomas
Browne never wrote a single line, even in his greenest studies, that on
his deathbed he desired to blot out. A purer, a humbler, a more devout
and detached hand never put English pen to paper than was the hand of Sir
Thomas Browne. And, if ever in his greener days he had a doubt about any
truth of natural or of revealed religion, he tells us that he had fought
down every such doubt in his closet and on his knees.

I will not profanely paraphrase, or in any way water down the strong
words in which Sir Thomas Browne writes to himself in his secret papers
about prayer. All that has been said about this very remarkable man only
makes what we are now to read all the more remarkable and memorable. All
Sir Thomas Browne's readers owe an immense debt to Simon Wilkin; and for
nothing more than for rescuing for us these golden words of this man of
God. 'They were not,' says Wilkin, 'intended by Browne for the perusal
of his son, as so many of his private papers were, or of any one else.'
And hence their priceless value.

'To be sure that no day pass wi