Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/250

230 contradict reason ("they have not only been illustrated but maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason"), and so far from being willing to resign them to theologians while he turns to science, they are his favourite subject of meditation. "'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with these involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation and Resurrection." And when Browne turns from divinity to philosophy it is not to find, with Descartes and Kepler and Galileo, nature a mechanism, whose laws are to be deduced mathematically, a homeless world from which Pascal fled to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not of the philosophers and men of science. In nature Browne finds a second book wherein the hand of God may be traced. "'Beware of Philosophy' is a precept not to be received in too large a sense, for in the mass of nature there is a set of things that carry in their front, though not in capital letters yet in stenography and short characters, something of divinity, which to wiser reasons serve as luminaries in the abyss of knowledge, and to judicious beliefs as scales and roundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity." Browne's science is theological, his deepest interest in final causes. The miracles of religion do not surprise one who knows the marvels of nature and the miracles of his own life. If Browne's Religio Medici startled the readers of his day, it was not in virtue of any divorce of reason from faith, but rather of the confident, rationalist though devout tone in which he approached questions religious and philosophical,—that, and the tolerant character of his