On St. Andrew’s Day 1680 Boyle was elected President of the Royal Society. The anniversary meeting and the dinner that followed it had brought a large gathering of the philosophers together. Evelyn was there, and his diary records the election of “that excellent person and greate Philosopher Mr. Robert Boyle, who indeede ought to have been the very first; but neither his infirmities nor his modestie could now any longer excuse him.” But Evelyn omits to mention that Boyle declined the presidency. He had an insuperable objection to tests and oaths. He took Counsel’s opinion in the matter, and he wrote to his old assistant Hooke,[331] explaining his “great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths”; asking Hooke to convey his thanks to the Society, but begging them to “proceed to a new election.” Less and less able now to attend the meetings of the Society, Boyle was gradually to withdraw also from the meetings of the East India Company, of which he was a Director, and of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, of which he was Governor. More and more did he retire into his quiet home-life in the house in Pall Mall, which had been enlarged to suit his purposes. There is no mention of him at the famous supper-party of the Royal Society, at which everything was cooked in Monsieur Papin’s Digestors—that “philosophical supper” which caused so much mirth and “exceedingly pleas’d all the company.” He is more likely to have been present a week or two later to see the Morocco Ambassador subscribe his name and titles in Arabic, on the occasion of his being admitted honorary member of the Royal Society. Boyle lived, indeed, much among his books and manuscripts, and in his laboratory. With the help of an amanuensis, he carried on a large correspondence among the new philosophers of the Old World, and the Christian missionaries in the New. The New Englanders wrote to him as their fount of charity: “Right Honourable, charitable, indefatiguable, nursing father.” He had tried to spread the knowledge of the Bible in the East, in Turkish and Arabic, and in the Malayan tongue; and the publication of the Irish Bible was one of the great interests of his later years. While Narcissus Marsh[332] and others did the actual work of translation and dissemination in Ireland, Robert Boyle in Pall Mall promoted it “with his influence and purse”; and Boyle’s Irish Bible was to find its way into Gaelic Scotland also, before Scotland had a Gaelic Bible of her own.[333]