unquestioning submission–the authority
unquestioning submission–the authority of the Scriptures. In all secular matters he was ever ready to point the lance and do battle, but all that appealed to him on what he regarded as divine authority was beyond the pale, and it never entered into his mind to submit it to the test of reason. In the \ Religio Medici\ he declares his devoted adherence first to the guidance of Scripture, and secondly to the Articles of the Church, \ whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my private reason;\ and again, \ where the Scripture is silent, the Church is my text; where that speaks tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.\
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This implicit adherence
This implicit adherence to the literal text of Scripture led to his–shall I say active belief in, or passive acceptance of, the existence of Witchcraft, and thus to the only act in an otherwise blameless life which we must regard with regret and astonishment. I refer to the consenting part he took in the doing to death of two poor women at Bury St. Edmund s in the year 1664. It is my business to act as Browne s exponent, not as his apologist, but it must be borne in mind that in his day the \ higher criticism\ was a thing unheard of, and that the literal sense of the English translation of the Bible was accepted as binding not only by him but by the vast majority of the people, including the most learned men of the time. \
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Thou shalt not
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live\ was a plain command, and given a witch the believer s duty was also plain; that there had been witches there was ample scriptural evidence, but there was none that the days of witchcraft had passed away. Browne only shared this belief with his pious friend, the venerable Bishop Hall, and many men equally devout according to their lights; he makes no secret of the fact and acts in accordance with his convictions and the plain authority of Scripture. Thus it came about that these conscientious but mistaken men were induced to render possible, if not actually to countenance, the fiendish cruelties perpetrated by their unscrupulous allies. In matters which he considered less authoritative his views were so liberal as to gain for him the stigma of infidel or heretic; but let a
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man govern his
man govern his thoughts and actions by the private rules Browne laid down for his own guidance (vol. iv., p. 420), and it would be hard to regard him as otherwise than a God-fearing man, striving to live up to his profession. Aristotle, whose works on Natural History have descended to us in a very imperfect condition, lived in 385-322 B.C., and it was not till A.D. 79 that the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder the next great work, which has survived till our days, was completed, and by some of those most competent to form a judgment the additions which he made were not in all cases improvements. Other writers followed, but their productions were of little value, and it was not till the year 1544 that William Turner published at Cologne what Professor Newton describes as \
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