Dryden, John, 1631-1700; English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
a most useful work, but inevitably prepared the way for the sensible but
unimpressive preaching of the next century.
[Sidenote: Isaac Barrow (1630-1677).]
Isaac Barrow, Master of Trinity College, was the son of a respectable
tradesman, linendraper to Charles I. His royalist and Arminian opinions
kept him back under the Commonwealth, but after the Restoration he was
acknowledged as the first mathematician of his country, except, as he
was the first to allow, another Isaac whose surname was Newton. Newton,
who had been Barrow's pupil, revised his lectures on optics (1669), an
epoch-making work, but composed in Latin, as were his scarcely less
celebrated lectures on geometry. His reputation as an English classic
rests upon two great theological works, his _Treatise on the Pope's
Supremacy_ (edited, after his death, by Tillotson) and his _Exposition
of the Creed_, and upon his sermons, which do not seem to have been
extremely popular in his own day, though gaining the suffrage of such
dissimilar men as Locke and Charles II., who called Barrow 'an unfair
preacher, because he exhausted every topic, and left no room for
anything to be said by anyone who came after him.' It may be reasonably
conjectured that when Barrow preached before Charles he did not indulge
in the inordinate expansiveness, it was not prolixity, that sometimes
drove away his congregation. It is to the king's honour that his
bestowal of the mastership of Trinity upon Barrow was entirely his own
act.
[Sidenote: Robert South (1633-1716).]
Robert South, on the whole perhaps the greatest preacher of his age, was
born in 1633, and educated at Westminster and Christ Church. He is
accused by Antony Wood, the principal authority for his life, of having
been a time-server, who sided successively with the Independents, the
Presbyterians, and the Church of England in the days of their power.
Wood seems, however, to have had some private grievance against him; and
if South was really at the same time so pliant and so able, it seems
strange that he should have attained no higher preferment than stalls at
Christ Church and Westminster. Quarrelsome he certainly was, and he
entered into a most acrimonious controversy with Sherlock, which it
required a royal proclamation to compose. He died in 1716.
[Sidenote: John Tillotson (1630-1694).]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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