When the fury of the civil wars had exhausted all parties, and a breathing time from the passions and madness of the age allowed ingenious men to return once more to their forsaken studies, Bacon’s vision of a philosophical society appears to have occupied their reveries.  It charmed the fancy of Cowley and Milton; but the politics and religion of the times were still possessed by the same frenzy, and divinity and politics were unanimously agreed to be utterly proscribed from their inquiries.  On the subject of religion they were more particularly alarmed, not only at the time of the foundation of the society, but at a much later period, when under the direction of Newton himself.  Even Bishop Sprat, their first historian, observed, that “they have freely admitted men of different religions, countries, and professions of life, not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, popish, or protestant philosophy, but a philosophy of mankind.”  A curious protest of the most illustrious of philosophers may be found:  when “the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge were desirous of holding their meetings at the house of the Royal Society, Newton drew up a number of arguments against their admission.  One of them is, that “It is a fundamental rule of the society not to meddle with religion; and the reason is, that we may give no occasion to religious bodies to meddle with us.”  Newton would not even comply with their wishes, lest by this compliance the Royal Society might “dissatisfy those of other religions.”  The wisdom of the protest by Newton is as admirable as it is remarkable,—­the preservation of the Royal Society from the passions of the age.

It was in the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins in Wadham College that a small philosophical club met together, which proved to be, as Aubrey expresses it, the incunabula of the Royal Society.  When the members were dispersed about London, they renewed their meetings first at a tavern, then at a private house; and when the society became too great to be called a club, they assembled in “the parlour” of Gresham College, which itself had been raised by the munificence of a citizen, who endowed it liberally, and presented a noble example to the individuals now assembled under its roof.  The society afterwards derived its title from a sort of accident.  The warm loyalty of Evelyn in the first hopeful days of the Restoration, in his dedicatory epistle of Naude’s treatise on libraries, called that philosophical meeting THE ROYAL SOCIETY.  These learned men immediately voted their thanks to Evelyn for the happy designation, which was so grateful to Charles the Second, who was himself a virtuoso of the day, that the charter was soon granted:  the king, declaring himself their founder, “sent them a mace of silver-gilt, of the same fashion and bigness as those carried before his majesty, to be borne before the president on meeting days.”  To the zeal of Evelyn the Royal Society owes no inferior acquisition to its title and its mace:[277] the noble