 Like many children Boyle had his share of near escapes from serious injury as a child, but the time and Boyle being what they were he saw in each of them the hand of God. Michael Hunter has pointed out that “the spiritual autobiography, aimed at chronicling God’s purpose for the individual in question by recounting providential escapes, spiritual trials and conversion experiences,” was “a characteristic genre of autobiographical writing in seventeenth-century England” (Hunter 1994a, xx), and Nicolas Canny notes that “The invocation of providence as an explanation for accidental or chance happenings in this life was so commonplace among sincere Protestants in the early seventeenth century that it had come to be considered irreverent or profane not so to attribute them” (Canny 1982, 28). But, though common enough, there is no doubt that, in Boyle’s case at least, the protestations were sincere. He continued to believe in this divine attention, though in a more intellectual realm, throughout his life. In 1663 he wrote,