ture two books stand out beside one another and are alone in this
supreme respect of charity: William Law's _Spirit of Love_, and Sir
Thomas Browne's _Religio Medici_.

SELECTED PASSAGES

SIR THOMAS ON HIMSELF

I have ever endeavoured 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 comports and sympathiseth with all
things; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humour,
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 them 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, and Dutch: but where I find their actions in
balance with my countrymen's, I honour, love, and embrace them in the
same degree. I was born in the eighth climate, but seem 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.

I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms
superstition: my common conversation I do acknowledge austere, my
behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity; yet at my
devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with
all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my
invisible devotion. I should violate my own arm rather than a church,
nor willingly deface the name