How I wish that I could say as much about the central six chapters of
Hooker's masterly Fifth Book: as also about his evangelical and immortal
_Discourse of Justification_! A well-read friend of mine suddenly said
to me in a conversation we were holding the other day about Sir Thomas
Browne's religion, 'The truth is,' he said, 'Browne was nothing short of
a Pelagian, and that largely accounts for his popularity on the Continent
of his day.' That was a stroke of true criticism. And Sir Thomas's own
Tertullian has the same thing in that most comprehensive and conclusive
phrase of his: _anima naturaliter Christiana_. But, that being admitted
and accepted, which must be admitted and accepted in the interests of the
truth; this also must still more be proclaimed, admitted, and accepted,
that when he comes to God, and to Holy Scripture, and to prayer, and to
immortality, Sir Thomas Browne is a very prince of believers. In all
these great regions of things Sir Thomas Browne's faith has a height and
a depth, a strength and a sweep, that all combine together to place him
in the very foremost rank of our most classical writers on natural and
revealed religion. Hooker himself in some respects gives place to Sir
Thomas Browne.
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