Preaching and Preachers [pp. 454-483]

Preaching and Preachers.
of this difference much beyond any substantial ground, and
sometimes made the pulpit a place for dogmatic discussion and
patristic lore, to a degree which was unseasonable and offensive. In its more favourable manifestations, the learning of
the Anglican Church has been nobly brought out in defence of
the truth; especially against the freethinkers, the Unitarians
and the Papists. A body of divinity might be compiled solely
from the sermons of great English divines; a library might be
filled with the elaborate dissertations which they have preached.
No one could reasonably expect us, in an article of such
limits and character as this, to recite the splendid roll of English preachers; but there are a few whom we would earnestly
commend to the notice of every theological student. Omitting
entirely the great names which occur in an earlier period, it is
important to mention the four bright luminaries, Barrow, Taylor, South, and Tillotson, each so unrivalled in his way, and
all so unlike. Barrow was an extraordinary man, as a traveller, a philologist, a mathematician, and a divine. He read
Chrysostom at Constantinople before he was made Greek professor at Cambridge. He was predecessor of Sir Isaac Newton
in the mathematical chair. Both pursuits tended to make him
the eloquent reasoner. It was the age of long periodic sentences, such as appal modern lungs, and Barrow knew how to
give a sonorous swell and climacteric advance to his Demosthenic passages. Many is the period in his pages, which for
matter might fit out the whole fifteen minutes' sermon of a
dapper Oxonian of our times. He abounds in high argument,
which is more inflamed by passion than coloured by decoration. His noblest passages leave us thrilling with his passion,
rather than captivated by his imagination. I-He is sometimes
too abundant, and sometimes unwieldy; but not dull, not weak,
not quaint. A ponderous earnestness and a various wealth
strike you in every page. With Barrow, multitude of words is
never verbosity, and length of discussion is never diffuseness; it
is massive strength without brevity. Hence, we do not wonder
that the great Chatham should have taken him as a model,
reading over some of his sermons as much as twenty times.
"In his sermons," says Mr. Granger, "he knew not how to
leave off writing, till he had exhausted his subject; and his ad VOL. XXVI.-NO. III. 59
1854.]
465