Isaac Barrow was born in London in 1630. His father was draper to
the king. His mother died when he was four years old. He was named
Isaac after an uncle, who died in 1680, Bishop of St. Asaph. Young
Isaac Barrow was educated at the Charterhouse School, and at
Felstead, before he went, in 1643, to Cambridge. He entered first
at Peterhouse, where his uncle Isaac was a Fellow, but at that time
his uncle was ejected from his Fellowship for loyalty to the King's
cause, and removed to Oxford; the nephew, who entered at Cambridge,
therefore avoided Peterhouse, and went to Trinity College. Young
Barrow's father also was at Oxford, where he gave up all his worldly
means in service of the King.
The young student at Cambridge did not conceal his royalist feeling,
but obtained, nevertheless, a scholarship at Trinity, with some
exemptions from the Puritan requirements of subscription. He took
his B.A. degree in 1648, and in 1649 was elected to a fellowship of
Trinity, on the same day with his most intimate college friend John
Ray, the botanist. Ray held in the next year several college
offices; was made in 1651 lecturer in Greek, and in 1653 lecturer in
Mathematics. Barrow proceeded to his M.A. in 1652, and was admitted
to the same degree at Oxford in 1653. In 1654, Dr. Dupont, who had
been tutor to Barrow and Ray, and held the University Professorship
of Greek, resigned, and used his interest, without success, to get
Barrow appointed in his place. Isaac Barrow was then a young man of
four-and-twenty, with the courage of his opinions in politics and in
church questions, which were not the opinions of those in power.
In 1655 Barrow left Cambridge, having sold his books to raise money
for travel. He went to Paris, where his father was with other
royalists, and gave some help to his father. Then he went on to
Italy, made stay at Florence, and on a voyage from Leghorn to Smyrna
stood to a gun in fight with a pirate ship from Algiers that was
beaten off. At college and upon his travels Barrow was helped by
the liberality of public spirited men who thought him worth their
aid. He went on to Constantinople, where he studied the Greek
Fathers of the Church; and he spent more than a year in Turkey. He
returned through Germany and Holland, reached England in the year
before the Restoration, and then, at the age of twenty-nine, he
entered holy orders, for which in all his studies he had been
preparing.
The Cambridge Greek Professorship, which had before been denied him,
was obtained by Barrow immediately after the Restoration. Soon
afterwards he was chosen to be Professor of Geometry at Gresham
College. In 1663 he preached the sermon in Westminster Abbey at the
consecration of his uncle, Isaac, as Bishop of St. Asaph. In that
year also he became, at Cambridge, the first Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics, for which office he resigned his post at Gresham
College.
As Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Barrow had among his
pupils Isaac Newton. Newton succeeded to the chair in 1669. Barrow
resigned because he feared that the duties of the mathematical chair
drew his thoughts too much from the duties of the pulpit, towards
the full performance of which he had desired all studies to be aids.
He was then intent upon the writing of an "Exposition of the Creed,
Decalogue, and Sacraments." He held a prebend in Salisbury
Cathedral, and a living in Wales, that yielded little for his
support after the Professorship had been resigned. But he was one
of the King's chaplains, was made D.D. by the King in 1670, and in
1672 he was appointed Master of Trinity by Charles II., who said,
when he appointed Isaac Barrow, "that he gave the post to the best
scholar in England." Barrow was Vice-Chancellor of the University
when he died in 1677, during a visit to London on the business of
his college.
The sermons here given were first published in 1678, in a volume
entitled "Several Sermons against Evil-speaking." That volume
contained ten sermons, of which the publisher said that "the two
last, against pragmaticalness and meddling in the affairs of others,
do not so properly belong to this subject." The sermons here given
follow continuously, beginning with the second in the series. The
text of the first sermon was "If any man offend not in word, he is a
perfect man." The texts to the last three were: "Speak not evil
one of another, brethren;" "Judge not;" and "That ye study to be
quiet, and to do your own business."
There were also published in 1678, the year after Barrow's death, a
sermon preached by him on the Good Friday before he died, a volume
of "Twelve Sermons preached upon several Occasions," and the second
edition of a sermon on the "Duty and Reward of Bounty to the Poor."
Barrow's works were collected by Archbishop Tillotson, and
published, in four folio volumes, in the years 1683-1687. There
were other editions in three folios in 1716, in 1722, and in 1741.
Dr. Dibdin said of Barrow that he "had the clearest head with which
mathematics ever endowed an individual, and one of the purest and
most unsophisticated hearts that ever beat in the human breast." In
these sermons against Evil Speaking he distinguishes as clearly as
Shakespeare does between the playfulness of kindly mirth that draws
men nearer to each other and the words that make division. No man
was more free than Isaac Barrow from the spirit of unkindness. The
man speaks in these sermons. Yet he could hold his own in wit with
the light triflers of the court of Charles the Second. It is of him
that the familiar story is told of a playful match at mock courtesy
with the Earl of Rochester, who meeting Dr. Barrow near the king's
chamber bowed low, saying, "I am yours, doctor, to the knee
strings." Barrow (bowing lower), "I am yours, my lord, to the shoe-
tie." Rochester: "Yours, doctor, down to the ground." Barrow:
"Yours, my lord, to the centre of the earth." Rochester (not to be
out-done): "Yours, doctor, to the lowest pit of hell." Barrow:
"There, my lord, I must leave you."
Barrow's mathematical power gave clearness to his sermons, which
were full of sense and piety. They were very carefully written,
copied and recopied, and now rank with the most valued pieces of the
literature of the pulpit. He was deeply religious, although he had,
besides learning, a lively wit, and never lost the pluck that taught
him how to man a gun against a pirate. He was "low of stature,
lean, and of a pale complexion," so untidy that on one occasion his
appearance in the pulpit is said to have caused half the
congregation to go out of church. He gave his whole mind and his
whole soul to his work for God. Mythical tales are told of the
length of some of his sermons, at a time when an hour's sermon was
not considered long. Of one charity-sermon the story is that it
lasted three hours and a half, and that Barrow was requested to
print it--"with the other half which he had not had time to
deliver." But we may take this tale as one of the quips at which
Barrow himself would have laughed very good-humouredly.
H. M.