the natural sweetness of his temper" in the Puritan doctrines, and his powers began to expand when the study of Chillingworth, about 1654, opened his eyes to a theology less narrow than that in which he had been bred. In 1660 he was ordained in London by the Scotch Bishop of Galloway, yet still adhered to the Presbyterians, and as a member of that body was ejected from his fellowship at Clare Hall. In 1661, however, Tillotson complied with the Act of Uniformity, and was appointed to a curacy at Cheshunt, in Herts. Two years later, a sermon that Tillotson happened to preach at St. Lawrence Jewry so delighted the Benchers of Lin

coln's Inn, that they

to their Society.

He

My Lord

Edmonton Jan. 23. 19.

immediately appointed free you Letter;, & find it agreed on all hands him resident preacher that the 6 months for taking the Oaths are ex: yet I think his Matie will not be hasty in disposing the places of those that are deprived;

now became celebrated - pir'd ; but yet I

as a theological lecturer, introducing into preaching a more rational and decorous style of lan

guage and delivery than

congregations had been used to from the Puritans. In 1664, Tillot

son married Elizabeth

French, the niece of

Oliver Cromwell. He was suspected of still leaning towards the

He hath not

& yet

taid any thing to me about it. taken into consideration I

When that matter is

a

motion for thesupply

recom

will not be unmind full of yo of Gloucester, and am glad you Lop hath pitched upon the same Person I alwayes designed to He mend to his Matie for that Bishoprick The great difficulty I doubt will be to pirsunde him to accept it though he keep the Living he hath in Comendam with out wich he will be undone by the smallines of the Bprick, having a Wife & many children. The weather is 6th I have a great cold, otherwise I & my wifi had bifre a am, my Lord 2. Lop. & my in the churches might this waited upon you Lop. & my Lady ch Cops, most oblegid Shung

Dissenters; and, indeed, it was true that, until

the very end of his life, Tillotson never ceased to hope that the schism

without

very,

Autograph Letter of Tillotson

be healed. He was made Dean of Canterbury in 1672, in spite of his having given great offence at court by his sermons against Popery. In 1677, when the Prince and Princess of Orange were proceeding to Holland in great discomfort, and lacking some of the necessaries of life, Tillotson braved court opinion by entertaining them at his deanery, and facilitating their journey. In later years this act was not forgotten. For the next ten years his life was uneventful, except for the theological disputes in which the Dean was engaged; but when William III. came to the throne, his host at Canterbury was not overlooked. In 1690, on the deprivation of Sancroft, the king was importunate that Tillotson should become Primate; but the Dean was already unpopular with his fellow-clergy, and shrank from the ordeal of being lifted, in this almost unprecedented way, over the heads of all the English bishops. He hesitated

Isaac Barrow

1

long, from February 1690 to April 1691, when he at last consented to be nominated to the Archbishopric. As Primate, Tillotson enjoyed the closest favour, both of William III. and of Mary II., but continued unpopular among the clergy at large. On the 18th of November 1694, while preaching in Whitehall Chapel, Tillotson had a stroke of apoplexy, which he was able so far to suppress as not to interrupt the service. He died, however, on the fourth day after, and was buried in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry. William III. mourned his archbishop with sincerity; the king attributed "his safety on the throne, in a great measure, to his most loyal subject," Tillotson. Charm was the predominant feature of this eminent divine; he was graceful and handsome in figure and face, very blonde, with bushy brown hair and bright eyes. As a preacher, he was universally admitted to be the most eloquent of his generation, and, except on the subject of Papists, his delicate suavity never quitted him. His published writings are but his sermons enlarged and elaborated.

FROM TILLOTSON'S "SERMONS."

How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world? How long might a man be in sprinkling colours upon a canvas with a careless hand before they could happen to make the exact picture of a man? And is a man easier made by chance than his picture? How long might twenty thousand blind men, which should be sent out from the several remote parts of England, wander up and down before they would all meet upon Salisbury Plains, and fall into rank and file in the exact order of an army? And yet this is much more easy to be imagined than how the innumerable blind parts of matter should rendezvous themselves into a world.

By the side of Tillotson, ISAAC BARROW appears ponderous and even long-winded. He belongs to the new school more by what he avoids than by what he attains. He was a man of great intellectual force, who, born into an age which was beginning to stigmatise certain faults in its predecessor, was able to escape those particular errors of false ornament and studied. quaintness, but could not train his somewhat elephantine feet to dance on the tight-rope of delicate ease. The matter of Barrow is always solid and virile, and he has phrases of a delightful potency. In considering the place of the great divines in the movement of literature, it is to be borne in mind that sermons were now to a vast majority of auditors their principal intellectual pabulum. In days when there were no newspapers, no magazines, no public libraries, and no popular lectures, when knowledge was but sparsely distributed in large and costly books, all who were too decent to encounter the rough speech and lax morality of the theatre had no source of literary entertainment open to them except the churches. We groan nowadays under the infliction of a long sermon, but in the seventeenth century the preacher who stopped within the hour defrauded an eager audience of a pleasure. It is not necessary to suppose that with the decay of puritanical enthusiasm the appetite for listening to sermons came to an end. On the contrary, public taste became more eclectic, and a truly popular divine was more than ever besieged in his pulpit. To these conditions the preachers lent themselves, and those who had literary skill revelled in

opportunities which were soon to quit them for the essayist and the journalist. Nor was the orthodoxy of the hour so strenuous that it excluded a great deal of political and social allusion. Sermons and books of divinity were expected to entertain. There are few treatises of the age so lively as the religious pamphlets of the author of the Whole Duty of Man,1 and it was an appreciator of the wicked wit of South who protested that his addresses should be called, not Sunday, but week-day sermons.

Isaac Barrow (1630-1677) was the son of King Charles I.'s linen-draper, Thomas Barrow. He was sent to school at the Charterhouse, where he principally distinguished himself by fighting his schoolfellows. His father was heard to say that

"if it pleased God to take any of his children, he often solemnly wished it might be Isaac." But at school at

Felsted he made great progress, and in 1645 he was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of his uncle, Isaac Barrow, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph. But the latter was ejected from his college of Peterhouse by the Puritans, and the family lost everything by adhering to the king's cause. The younger Isaac, however, continued to cling to Trinity, being in 1649 elected a fellow of that college; and before he was twenty-five he had gained a solid reputation as a Greek scholar and as a mathematician. In 1655, Barrow determined to see the world, and got as far as Asia Minor. On the voyage from Italy to Smyrna the ship was attacked by pirates from

Isaac Barrow

Algiers, and the future divine, taking charge of a gun, fought with the greatest determination until the enemy withdrew. Barrow has described the battle in Latin verse and prose. He lived more than a year in Constantinople, studying the writings of St. Chrysostom, and returned to England, after an absence of four years, by Venice-where he was nearly burned at sea-Germany and Holland in 1659. Barrow in 1660 was chosen without a competitor to be Greek professor at Cambridge, and in 1663 he was appointed the first Lucasian professor of mathematics at the same university. But as he found that "he could not make a Bible 1 The authorship of this famous book is still uncertain; but in 1884 Mr. C. E. Doble brought forward strong evidence to show that it, and its allied manuals, were written by Dr. Richard Allestree (1619-1681).

out of his Euclid, nor a pulpit out of his mathematical chair," he resigned the latter in 1669 in favour of his pupil, Isaac Newton, after publishing his Lectiones Optica, which Newton revised. For a while, Barrow was without definite employment, and a little out of temper with the world; but in 1672, Pearson being made Bishop of Chester, Barrow received the Mastership of Trinity. The king said that the post was given to Barrow as to "the best scholar in England." He held it only five years, for during a visit to London, where he was preaching the Passion sermon in the Guildhall, he died, after a very short illness, "in mean lodgings over a saddler's shop near

Charing Cross," on the 4th of May 1677. Barrow was buried in Westminster Abbey. He was mourned as certainly the most learned man of his day; and when the range of Barrow's erudition is considered, in mathematics, optics, classical research, theology, and philosophy, the equipment of his mind was quite extraordinary, especially as he had only reached the age of forty-seven. He was a very fine preacher, but he had the defect of excessive length. Once, when he was preaching at Westminster Abbey, he continued speaking so long, that the vergers were forced at length to set the organs playing "till they had blowed him down." Some of his sermons are said to have been prepared for a delivery of over four hours each. A great many entertaining anecdotes are preserved of Barrow's habits in a memorial letter which Abraham Hill wrote to Tillotson. He was considered intemperate in the use of fruit and of tobacco. His theological works, four massive folios, were posthumously published in 1683-89, under the editorial care of Tillotson. to whom the MSS. were given by Barrow's father, who survived him until 1687.

FROM BARROW'S "PLEASANTNESS OF RELIGION."

Wisdom acquaints us with ourselves, our own temper and constitution, our propensions and passions, our habitudes and capacities; a thing not only of mighty advantage, but of infinite pleasure and content to us. No man in the world less knows a fool than himself; nay, he is more than ignorant, for he constantly errs in the point, taking himself for, and demeaning himself as, toward another, a better, a wiser, and abler man than he is. He hath wonderful conceits of his own qualities and faculties; he affects commendations incompetent to him; he soars at employment surpassing his ability to manage. No comedy can represent a mistake more odd and ridiculous than his : for he wanders, and stares, and hunts after, but never can find nor discern himself: but always encounters with a false shadow instead thereof, which he passionately hugs and admires. But a wise man, by constant observation and impartial reflection upon himself, grows very familiar with himself; he perceives his own inclinations, which, if bad, he strives to alter and correct; if good, he cherishes and corroborates them he apprehends the matter he is fitting for, and capable to manage, neither too mean and unworthy of him, nor too high and difficult for him; and those applying his care to, he transacts easily, cheerfully, and successfully. So being neither puffed up with vain and over-weening opinion, nor dejected with heartless diffidence of himself, neither admiring nor despising; neither irksomely hating, nor fondly loving himself; he continues in good humour, maintains a sure friendship and fair correspondence with himself, and rejoices in the retirement and private conversation with his own thoughts: whence flows a pleasure and satisfaction inexpressible.

From the rapid and luminous compositions of the divines, it was but a Temple step to the masters of elegant mundane prose. Cruel commentators have conspired to prove that there was no subject on which Sir WILLIAM TEMPLE was so competent as to excuse the fluency with which he wrote about it. That the matter contained in the broad volumes of his Works is not of great extent or value must be conceded; but style does not live by matter only, and it is the bright modern note, the ease and grace, the rapidity and lucidity, that give to Temple his faint but perennial charm. He is the author, too, of one famous sentence, which may be quoted here, because it marks in a very clear way the movement of English prose. Let us listen to the cadence of these words :

"When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

This is the modern manner of using English. It is divided by an abysm from the prose of the Commonwealth, and in writing such a sentence Temple showed himself nearer to the best authors of our living age than he was to such contemporaries of his own as Hobbes or Browne.

Sir William Temple (1628-1699), the son of Sir John Temple, was born in Blackfriars in 1628. He was educated at the rectory of Penshurst until 1638, and for the next five years at Bishop Stortford. After spending two years at home, "being hindered by the disorders of the time from going to the university," Temple entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1646. At college he gave his time chiefly to acquiring French and Spanish, and early in 1647 began to travel. On his way to France, he met Miss Dorothy Osborn in the Isle of Wight, and engaged himself to her. Seven years later