Evelyn, who knew Robert Boyle intimately for nearly forty years, was of opinion that he “held the same free thoughts,” in matters of religion and religious discipline, “which he had of Philosophy.” He practised Christianity “without noise, dispute, or determining.” He owned no master in religion but the Divine Author of it; and, what is more, he owned “no religion but primitive, no rule but Scripture, no law but right reason; for the rest allways conformable to the present settlement, without any sort of singularity.”[195]
Only once is Robert Boyle known to have been persuaded to enter a conventicle. Curiosity led him, on one occasion, to Sir Henry Vane’s house, to hear the great man preach “in a large thronged room a long sermon.”[196] The text was from Daniel xii. 2: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Looking, from a modern point of view, to the possibilities of such a text on the Resurrection, it is a little disappointing to learn that Mr. Boyle stood up at the end of Sir Henry Vane’s discourse and submitted, in his gentlest Oxford manner, that the preacher had suffered the meaning to “evaporate into Allegory.” Sir Henry Vane was at this time at the very height of his authority in the State; and Robert Boyle, telling the story to Sir Peter Pett, explained that Sir Henry’s congregation that day was composed of “dependants on him, and expectants from him,” who would never have dreamed of questioning his interpretations of Scripture, whatsoever they might have been. “But I,” said Boyle, “having no little awes of that kind upon me, thought myself bound to enter the lists with him as I did, that the sense of the Scriptures might not be depraved.”
According to Birch, Sir Henry Vane had the last word. He had recognised in his critic the celebrated Mr. Robert Boyle; and when Mr. Boyle sat down, Sir Henry assured him and the rest of his audience that he had only intended his remarks on the words of Daniel to be in the way of occasional reflections.[197]
But there was another little congregation, which met in an upper room in Oxford; a room in the house of the obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins of Wadham. This was the weekly meeting of the Invisibles; the “learned Junto,” as Evelyn has dubbed them; a society which may be described as non-militant and non-party, and was certainly non-sectarian—the Oxford branch of the original Invisible or Philosophical College, begun in London in 1645, before Wilkins and Wallis and Goddard removed to Oxford. The Oxford branch kept up a regular correspondence with the London Society; and after a time, when Wilkins forsook Oxford for Cambridge, the weekly meetings of the Invisibles were transferred from Wadham to Robert Boyle’s own rooms.
And what a brilliant little “learned Junto” it was, in spite of the scrupulosities of the times! There was Wilkins himself, an Oxford man by birth, son of the Oxford goldsmith with the “very mechanicall hands” and a head that “ran much on perpetuall motion.” Wilkins was a man of about forty, “lustie, strong-groune, well-sett and broad-shouldered.” His manners were courteous, as became a man who had been Chaplain to Charles I’s nephew, the Prince Palatine, elder brother of Prince Rupert. A Parliament-man himself, Wilkins had taken the Covenant and the Wardenship of Wadham, and his Theological Degree. Under his tolerant rule, Wadham was flourishing, still patronised by some of the great “Malignant” families of England: Dr. Wilkins’s cheerful tolerance was greasing all wheels. And meanwhile the Warden himself was the life and spirit of the New Philosophy at Oxford—known, not only for his universal curiosity and irresistible manners, but as a writer of books. Had he not, as early as 1638, when still quite a young man, attempted to prove that the Moon might be a habitable world? And had he not, to a third edition, added the bold hypothesis, that the Moon might one day be reached “by volitation”? And in 1640 he had propounded in print the probability that this Earth itself was a planet. Clearly, the Warden was before his time; and many things besides the consciences of young cavalier-manhood were safe in his keeping.
And then there was Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, since 1649 Savilian Professor of Geometry. Wallis was about thirty-eight; a man of “moderate principles,” robust and energetic, with a serene temper that was “not easily ruffled,” but all the same a man who could hit out from the shoulder when he wanted to; as he did when he carried on his famous controversy with Dr. Hobbes. Wallis, as a believer in the New Philosophy, was to be among the first men to “maintain the circulation of the blood.” But the particular feat which had made Wallis’s fortune, some years before he went to Oxford, was a feat in “cryptologie.” In December 1642 he was private chaplain to a great family in London; and one evening at supper a cypher letter had arrived, which brought important political news. The Chaplain, in two hours, succeeded in deciphering it; and after that he seems to have become “cryptologist-in-chief” to the Parliamentarian Army: he is said to have had the deciphering of the King’s private correspondence taken at the battle of Naseby. He held successive City livings, was Secretary to the Westminster Assembly, and one of the founders of the Invisible Society. And in 1649—a married man, then—he went to Oxford as Savilian Professor of Geometry and one of the most vigorous of the “learned Junto.”
Dr. Goddard of Wood Street was another of them. He was a Deptford man, son of a ship-builder; in 1654 a man of about thirty-seven. He had been a student at Oxford, but had left it to study medicine abroad; and on his return he had taken his medical degrees at Cambridge. Since 1646 he had been in London, a Fellow of the College of Physicians, living in Wood Street, where he entertained the Invisibles and manufactured his arcana—the famous “Goddard’s drops” among them—in his own private laboratory. As Cromwell’s physician, he had been with Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns and in Cromwell’s severe illness in Edinburgh; and on his return with him to London, after the battle of Worcester, he had been appointed Warden of Merton.
And living just opposite to Merton College was the Oxford-bred Willis, with his strong royalist and episcopal sympathies, son-in-law of the stubborn old Dean of Christ Church and the lady who had been deposited in the quadrangle. Willis was a greater man in his own profession than the inventor of “Goddard’s drops.” A firm believer in the New Philosophy, he was to dissect many brains: a little bit of our cerebral geography is still known as the “Circle of Willis.” He is the man who discovered diabetes mellitus, and he may be called our first specialist in diseases of the nervous system.
These, with the “miracle of a youth” Christopher Wren, then Fellow of All Souls, and Seth Ward, the dangerously witty Savilian Professor of Astronomy, who lodged in the chamber over the gateway of Wadham, formed the “learned Junto” that welcomed Robert Boyle to Oxford. But the Librarian of the Bodleian, Dr. Barlow,[198] must not be forgotten, though he was not an Invisible, and not at all in favour of the New Philosophy. Boyle, like many men of his time, was a student of divinity as well as of science; and he had come to Oxford partly, perhaps, on account of the Orientalists there. For he was studying Hebrew, Greek, Chaldee and Syriac, so as to be able to read the Scriptures for himself. He had learnt by himself, he says, “as much Greek and Hebrew as sufficed to read the Old and New Testaments,” merely that he might do so in the Hebrew and Greek, and thereby free himself from the necessity of relying on a translation. And “a Chaldee grammar I likewise took the pains of learning, to be able to understand that part of Daniel, and those few other portions of Scripture that were written in that tongue; and I have added a Syriac grammar purely to be able one day to read the divine discourses of our Saviour in His own language.” And he quotes the “known saying”—