Sermons on Evil-Speaking

This eBook was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.




SERMONS ON EVIL SPEAKING

BY ISAAC BARROW, D.D.




CONTENTS.

Introduction by Professor Henry Morley.

Against Foolish Talking and Jesting.

Against Rash and Vain Swearing.

Of Evil-speaking in General.

The Folly of Slander. Part 1.

The Folly of Slander. Part 2.




INTRODUCTION.



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."