“It has long been,” he says, “as well my wonder as my grief, to see such comparatively petty differences in judgement make such wide breaches and vast divisions in affection. It is strange that men should rather be quarrelling for a few trifling opinions, wherein they dissent, than to embrace one another for those many fundamental truths wherein they agree. For my own part, in some two or three and forty months that I spent in the very town of Geneva, as I never found that people discontented with their own Church government (the gallingness of whose yoke is the grand scarecrow that frights us here) so could I never observe in it any such transcendent excellency as could oblige me either to bolt Heaven against, or open Newgate for, all those that believe they may be saved under another....” 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]