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It was truly a dark and stormy night. An adolescent boy, deep asleep, was jarred awake by the concussion of thunder right overhead. Lightning repeatedly ripped the sky outside his window. He was terrified.

The flaming night pressed in on his imagination until he saw himself standing, on judgment day, amid the final conflagration that would consume the world. He trembled at the thought that he was not prepared to face that day, and he resolved to live for God. Robert Boyle kept that vow throughout his life. He dated his conversion from that awful night.

Within months, however, his faith came under attack. During a casual visit to the original Carthusian abbey of Grande Chartreuse in "those Wild Mountaines" near Grenoble, as Boyle described them in a memoir, he became deeply depressed. There, "the Devil taking advantage of that deepe, raving Melancholy, [and] so sad a Place" planted in his mind "distracting Doubts of some of the Fundamentals of Christianity." Boyle even contemplated suicide, drawing back only for fear of committing such a dreadful sin. Only after "a tedious languishment of many months" did it please God to "restore unto him the withdrawne sence of his Favor."

Religious doubt would henceforth be a defining characteristic of Boyle's personality, yet it played a positive role in the construction of his deeply thoughtful, charitably irenic faith.

His approach to doubt—the other side of the coin of faith—was frankly precocious. Just three months after his twentieth birthday, he wrote, "He whose Faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his Faith." Throughout his life, Boyle cultivated an active yet reflective piety. Daily he sought God in the pages of Scripture and investigated His wondrous works for the benefit of others.

Today, Boyle appears in high school chemistry courses as the scientist who formulated "Boyle's Law," describing the inverse relation between the pressure and volume of gases. Because of his many important discoveries, Boyle has been tagged "the father of chemistry."

What is absent from this image is the deeply religious man who wrote as much about God as he did about the nature of air; the man who considered himself a "priest" in the "temple" of nature; the man who paid for translations of the Bible into Gaelic and into the language of the Indians in Massachusetts.

Boyle's upbringing did not point him clearly either to science or to deep piety. Born in January 1627, he was the seventh son and fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, an unscrupulous man who took advantage of English colonialism in Ireland to become one of the wealthiest men in the realm.

Young "Robyn," as he was called, watched as his thirteen older brothers and sisters became pawns in a game of power, the boys given titles and lands and the girls married off to the sons of other powerful men—who usually had more love for their houses and horses than for their wives.

Robyn, however, declined a title and took a dim view of courtly mores. He narrowly avoided an arranged marriage himself, remaining celibate his entire life.

Although she was twelve years older, his sister Katherine became Robyn's closest confidant. A brilliant woman, she convened a salon for important intellectuals, including John Milton and several members of Parliament. Robyn lived in Katherine's London home for much of his adult life. She was also deeply pious and well versed in theology. Robyn, Katherine, and another illustrious sister, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, joined regularly in uplifting conversation—as Mary wrote in her diary, "good and profitable discourse of things wherewith we might edify one another."

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