Robert Boyle, born in the year after Bacon's death (1627), stands next to him among the Englishmen of the seventeenth century who advanced inductive science. His experiments—‘physico-mechanical, ’ as he describes them—led to the discovery of the law for the elasticity of the air; improvements in the air-pump and the thermometer were due to him; and his investigations were serviceable to Hydrostatics, Chemistry, and Medicine. In his theological writings it was his chief aim to show ‘the reconcilableness of reason and religion, ’ and thus to combat the most powerful prejudice which opposed the early progress of the New Philosophy. Boyle's mind, like Newton's, became more profoundly reverent the further he penetrated into the secrets of nature; his innermost feeling appears to be well represented by the title which he chose for one of his essays—‘On the high veneration man's intellect owes to God, peculiarly for his wisdom and power.’ Thus his ‘Disquisition on Einal Causes’ was designed to prove, as against inferences which had been drawn from the cosmical system of Descartes, that the structure of the universe reveals the work of a divine intelligence. Dying on December 30, 1691, he left a bequest which was in harmony with the main purpose of his life, and which might be regarded as his personal and permanent protest against the idea that a servant of science is an enemy of religion.

He assigned fifty pounds a year as a stipend ‘for some divine, or preaching minister, ’ who should ‘preach eight Sermons in the year for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz.