unchurch or ostracise any other man.  He does not stand at diameter and sword’s point with any other man; no, not even with his enemy.  He has never been able to alienate or exasperate himself from any man whatsoever because of a difference of an opinion.  He has never been angry with any man because his judgment in matters of religion did not agree with his.  In short he has no genius for disputes about religion; and he has often felt it to be his best wisdom to decline all such disputes.  When his head was greener than it now is, he had a tendency to two or three errors in religion, of which he proceeds to set down the spiritual history.  But at no time did he ever maintain his own opinions with pertinacity:  far less to inveigle or entangle any other man’s faith; and thus they soon died out, since they were only bare errors and single lapses of his understanding, without a joint depravity of his will.  The truth to Sir Thomas Browne about all revealed religion is this, which he sets forth in a deservedly famous passage:—­’Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in revealed religion for an active faith.  I love to lose myself in a mystery, and 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 impossibile est.  I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for anything else is not faith but persuasion.  I bless myself, and am thankful that I never saw Christ nor His disciples.  For then had my faith been thrust upon me; nor should I have enjoyed that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe and saw not.  They only had the advantage of a noble and a bold faith who lived before the coming of Christ; and who, upon obscure prophecies and mystical types, could raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities.  And since I was of understanding enough to know that we know nothing, my reason hath been more pliable to the will of faith.  I am now content to understand a mystery in an easy and Platonic way, and without a demonstration and a rigid definition; and thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop unto the lure of faith.’  The unreclaimed reader who is not already allured by these specimens need go no further in Sir Thomas Browne’s autobiographic book.  But he who feels the grace and the truth, the power and the sweetness and the beauty of such writing, will be glad to know that the whole Religio is full of such things, and that all this author’s religious and moral writings partake of the same truly Apostolic and truly Platonic character.  In this noble temper, with the richest mind, and clothed in a style that entrances and captivates us, Sir Thomas proceeds to set forth his doctrine and experience of God; of God’s providence; of Holy Scripture;