But by this time, Sir, I suppose not only that you have left wondering at my making some difficulty to put the annexed papers into your hands, but that I owe you and my other friends an account why I now consent to a compliance with desires which such powerful considerations would dissuade my assenting to.

My first inducement then to what I do, is the favourable character that you, and some other very competent judges have been pleased to give me of these papers, and especially your thereupon pressing their publication upon me, as a duty whereto I stand obliged to those many readers whom you would have me think likely to be benefited thereby. For in such cases, where knowing and sober persons think there is a great probability of a discourse doing good, it is not impossible but that an unwillingness to have it published, may not so much proceed out of modesty, as from some secret pride, almost as unjustifiable as if a physician should refuse to come abroad upon an urgent occasion, because he has not his best clothes on, or is not carefully dressed. And therefore, when I incline to make with you a case of conscience of the matter, I think myself obliged, whatever my private apprehensions may be of the success, to do my duty, and leave events to the wise and sovereign Disposer of them. It is not that I have the vanity to expect that I shall convert obstinate and resolved cavillers, nor much instruct the great clerks; but since I have not yet met with such a discourse as I intended mine to be; and since the greater part of the things I have written in it will not perhaps be elsewhere met with, I hope that what I have said may not be useless to those who have considered the subject I treat of less attentively than I have done; and may, if not procure a veneration for the Scripture in those that are altogether indisposed to it, yet atleast increase, or confirm it in those that have already entertained it, and furnish such devout persons with something to allege on the Scripture’s behalf, who are better furnished with affections than with arguments for it. And I the less scruple to allow myself such a hope, because you have been pleased to make, not only to me but to others, such a mention of the following papers, that after your preference of them to the other pieces of devotion you have seen of mine, (without excepting that discourse of seraphic love, which yet has had the luck to be so favourably entertained by readers of all sorts,) I shall confess to you, that as some of them do now appear very much dislocated and ἔ mangled, so others were penned with more care than any other of my writings about matters theological. And indeed I conceived myself obliged, in point of gratitude as well as duty, to speak as advantageously as I could of the Scripture; because, if I may without vanity make such an acknowledgment, I am sensible I have been benefited by it, and might have been much more so, if I had been as disposed to learn as the matchless book is qualified to teach: and I confess to you also, that since the physiological writings I have been induced to publish of late, and the sort of studies to which (for reasons to be told you at a proper opportunity) I seem at present to be wholly addicted to, make many look upon me as a naturalist: and since some persons, as well philosophers as physicians, have either faultily, or at least indiscreetly given many men occasion to think that those that being speculatively studious of nature’s mysteries, depart, as I often do, from the vulgar peripatetic philosophy, and especially if they seem to favour that which explicates the phænomena of nature by atoms, are inclined to atheism, or at least to an unconcernedness for any particular religion; since, I say, these things are so, I was not unwilling to lay hold of this opportunity to give a public testimony, whereby such as do not know me may be satisfied (for I presume all that do know me are so) that, if I be a naturalist, it is possible to be so without being an atheist, or of kin to it; and that the study of the works of nature has not made me either disbelieve the author of them, or deny his providence, or so much as disesteem his word, which deserves our respect upon several accounts, and especially that of its being the grand instrument of conveying to us the truths and mysteries of the Christian religion; my embracing of which I know not why I should be ashamed to own, since I think I can, to a competent and unprepossessed judge, give a rational account of my so doing.

To all this I might subjoin some apologies, which might perhaps serve to prevent or withdraw the censures of some sorts of readers.

For to critics and philologers I could represent, partly, that I have not a little impoverished my discourse, by making use of books to shun the repetition of what I found obvious already; partly, that when I wrote the essay, of which the ensuing treatise is a piece, I had thoughts of annexing to it annotations, wherein I hoped to illustrate, and by particular instances to exemplify, divers of those things which should appear to require it; or which else the reader might suspect I have slightly considered, because I seem to make but a transient mention of them; and partly too, that I ignored not the stricter interpretations given by modern critics to divers texts by me alleged, but that (not having opportunity to criticise) I was content to use them in their received or obvious sense; and have sometimes employed them but by way of allusion, or as arguments, ad hominem, (wherein some of my readers are like to acquiesce, though I do not,) and sometimes rather used them to express than prove my thoughts. And indeed, in these popular discourses, which are not written for, nor to be examined as regular disputations, men use not so much to look whether every thing be a strict truth, as whether it be proper to persuade or impress the truths they would inculcate; and especially in composures of the nature of this of mine, men have been rarely censured for being sometimes even indulgent to the exigencies of their themes. Those that require more of method than they will here find, may be advertised, that much of this scribble being designed to serve particular acquaintances of mine, it was fit it should insist on those points they were concerned in; and that, consequently, much of the seeming desultoriness of my method, and frequency of my rambling excursions, have been but intentional and charitable digressions out of my way, to bring some wandering friends into theirs, and may closely enough pursue my intentions, even when they seem most to deviate from my theme. And as for the longer excursions which either you or other judicious friends would needs have me leave here and there, I have, for the ease of my perusers, annexed to them some marks whereby they may be taken notice of to be digressions, that as I submit to their judgment, who think they may be useful to some readers, so I may comply with my own unwillingness to let them be troublesome to others, who by this means have an opportunity to pass by, if they please, such as they shall not expect to find themselves (either upon their own score or that of their acquaintances) concerned in. To those of the wits who, happening to be disregarders of the Scripture, may find themselves upon that account used here with any show of slighting or asperity, I may add to what I have already said in the papers themselves, that it hath been but as we pinch and cast cold water on the faces of persons in a swoon, to bring them out of it to themselves again: I have done it with as harmless intentions as those of the angel mentioned in the Acts,¹ when he struck Peter on the side, not to hurt him but to awake him,—lead him the way out of the prison he was bound in, and rescue him from imminent death. And if that will not satisfy some of the least judicious, or the most desperate, (for others I expect to find better affected, or more moderate,) I am willing to leave the intelligent and pious to judge between us; assuring those that are so much more jealous of their own honour than of God’s, that as I write to reclaim them, not to deprive them of the repute of wits, or share it with them, so I shall not over much deplore the being by them denied a title to which I have as little pretension as right. And, to dispatch, I might add, that orators may not unjustly bear with some rudenesses in the style of a person that professes not rhetoric, and writes of a subject that needs few of her ornaments, and rejects many as indecencies misbecoming its majesty; and that severer divines may safely pardon some smoothness in a discourse written chiefly for gentlemen, who would scarce be fond of truth in every dress, by a gentleman who feared it might misbecome a person of his youth and quality studiously to decline a fashionable style. And if any divine should censure me for intruding upon his profession, and handling my subject less skilfully than he would have done, I will not urge that to write well on this subject is a task, which he that shall try will perhaps find far less easy than one would imagine; but I shall rather tell him, that I hope I may obtain his pardon, by assuring him that I shall be as little angry to be rectified in my mistakes, as to be shown the way when I am out of it, and as little troubled to have this discourse, that but skirmishes with laziness and profaneness, surpassed by another on the same subject, as to see another embracer of the same quarrel come in with a fresh regiment, to assist me against a formidable enemy in a conflict I were engaged in but with a troop, or bring cannon against a fortress I had but sakers to batter with. Yes, I shall be glad if my dim, short-lived match but serve to light another’s brighter torch, and shall think it a happiness to have contributed, though but thus occasionally, towards the elucidation or splendour of the Scripture. And consonantly to this temper I would beseech any reader, that may so much want learning as to need such a request, not to measure what can be said in the defence and celebration of the Scripture’s style, by what hath in the following discourse been traced by the callow pen of a travelling layman. For I profess ingenuously, that there can as little be an unwelcomer as an unjuster compliment placed upon me, than to mistake any thing that I am able to say, and much less what I have said, for the best that can be said upon such a subject. Nor isit my least encouragement to consent to the publication of such incomplete writings, that the considerations already intimated will probably keep my readers from doing the Scripture and their own judgment so great an injury.

But I see I have so far transgressed the bounds of a letter, that if I add any thing more of apology, it must be for having been so prolix already. Wherefore there scarce remains any thing for me but to mind you, that since your persuasions have so much contributed to my exposing the following tract, incomplete as it is, your own credit is somewhat concerned in it as well as mine; and therefore I hope you will have a care that there be no faults of the printer added to those of the author, which do so little need additional blemishes. And especially that there pass no mistakes of the punctuation; for in such composures as this, if the stops be omitted or misplaced, it does not only lessen the gracefulness of what is said, but oftentimes quite spoil the sense. And if by this care of yours, which your affection, both for the subject and the writer, makes me confident of, and by the authority of your approbation, I find these imperfect considerations to be so favourably received as to deserve another edition, it will perhaps invite me to put them forth enlarged and recruited with what I may meet with pertinent to their subject, in such other papers of mine concerning the Scripture as I had not yet the conveniency to get into mine own hands and look over. However, though I pretend not here to, answer all objections against the style of the Scripture, yet, as I hope, I have been so happy as to answer some of them, and weaken most of the rest: so, if others that are more able will but employ themselves as earnestly in so useful a work, there is great hope that some answering this objection, another that, and a third another, they may at length be all of them satisfactorily replied to. And in the meantime I shall think my labours richly recompensed, if they either procure or establish a veneration for the Scripture in any of my readers, or do at least encourage those that are qualified for a far more prosperous making such an attempt, to undertake it, by showing those of them that know me what were easy for them to do, whilst they see what has been done even by me, whom sure they will not think to be half so much an orator, as I hope so uneasy a proof of his obedience will make you think him.

Sir,

Your affectionate friend,

And humble servant,

Robert Boyle.

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Contents · Some General Considerations →

Footnotes

1. Acts, xii. 7, &c. ↩