 When the great English natural philosopher Robert Boyle died at the end of 1691, he endowed a lecture series designed to promote Christianity against what Boyle took to be the atheism that had infected English culture after the revolutionary period of the mid-century. Famous Newtonians such as Samuel Clarke and William Whiston would eventually give the Boyle lectures. The first “Boyle lecturer” was the theologian Richard Bentley, who would eventually become the Master of Newton’s alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, and who also worked under Locke’s correspondent, Bishop Stillingfleet, himself an admirer of Newton’s (Gascoigne 1985: 65). When preparing his lectures for publication—they had been presented to a public audience in London in 1692—Bentley conferred with Newton, hoping to solicit his help in deciphering enough of the Principia to use its results as a bulwark against atheism (Bentley 1976). Newton obliged, and a famous correspondence between the two began (eventually published as Bentley 1756). The exchange is of great philosophical interest, for Bentley elicited a number of important clarifications that have no peer within Newton’s published oeuvre.