In the preceding chapters, I have shown how Boyle's views on reason's limits in the context of theology were reflected in his views on the limits of reason in the context of natural philosophy. The entire point of this book, indeed, has been the extent to which Boyle expected to find parallels between what might be known about the secrets of revelation and what might be known about the secrets of nature. Boyle approached his studies of theology and nature with certain assumptions about reason's limits, and then interpreted his findings in such a way as to reinforce those assumptions: His God had deliberately chosen to limit the power and scope of human reason, leaving human beings in something of a state of perpetual blindness concerning the ultimate truths of both nature and Christianity.

This picture of Boyle differs markedly from our traditional picture of him as a confident and single-minded advocate of both the corpuscularian philosophy and rational religion. The image of Boyle as emphasizing a more rational approach to both nature and theology than he in fact did has its roots in the way he was portrayed in the early and highly selective accounts of his life given by Gilbert Burnet in Boyle's funeral sermon on the second of January, 1692, and by Thomas Birch in the biography of Boyle accompanying the first edition of his Works (1744). This view of him has been perpetuated since by scholars who have taken the canonical image of Boyle at face value, finding it all too easy to elide various aspects of his thought and personality that violate twentiethcentury conceptions of religious and scientific rationality.