The great textual critic and controversial Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, is known to philosophy through the first Boyle lectures of 1692, entitled ‘A confutation of atheism’ and intended both to introduce Newton's mechanics, and to use it as a springboard for natural theology, especially in refutation of atheists such as Hobbes. A second series of lectures given two years later is now lost. Bentley's other philosophical work is Remarks on a late Discourse of Freethinking, an answer to the deist Anthony Collins.