Where a nation is exclusively commercial, it can make an immense accumulation of riches without sensibly altering its manners.  The passion of the trader is avarice and the habit of continuous labor.  Left alone to his instincts he amasses riches to possess them, without designing or knowing how to use them.  Examples are needed to conduct him to prodigality, ostentation, and moral corruption.  As a rule the merchant opposes the soldier.  One desires the accumulations of industry, the other of conquest.  One makes of power the means of getting riches, the other makes of riches the means of getting power.  One is disposed to be economical, a taste due to his labor.  The other is prodigal, the instinct of his valor.  In modern monarchies these two classes form the aristocracy and the democracy.  Commerce in certain republics forms an aristocracy, or rather an “extra aristocracy in the democracy.”  These are the directing forces of such democracies, with the addition of two other governing powers, which have come in, the clergy and the legal fraternity, who assist largely in shaping the course of events.

ISAAC BARROW (1630-1677)

It is not often that a sermon, however eloquent it may be, becomes a literary classic, as has happened to those preached by Barrow against Evil Speaking.  Literature—­that which is expressed in letters—­has its own method, foreign to that of oratory—­the art of forcing one mind on another by word of mouth.  Literature can rely on suggestion, since it leaves those who do not comprehend at once free to read over again what has attracted their attention without compelling their understanding.  All great literature relies mostly on suggestion.  This is the secret of Shakespeare’s strength in ‘Hamlet,’ as it is the purpose of Burke’s in such speeches as that at the trial of Hastings, to compel immediate comprehension by crowding his meaning on the hearer in phalanxed sentences, moving to the attack, rank on rank, so that the first are at once supported and compelled by those which succeed them.

It is not easy to find the secret by virtue of which sermons that made Barrow his reputation for eloquence escaped the fate of most eloquent sermons so far as to find a place in the standard “Libraries of English Classics,” but it lies probably in their compactness, clearness, and simplicity.  Barrow taught Sir Isaac Newton mathematics, and his style suggests the method of thought which Newton illustrated in such great results.

Born in London in 1630, Barrow was educated at the Charterhouse School, at Felstead, and at Cambridge.  Belonging to a Royalist family, under Cromwell, he left England after his graduation and traveled abroad, studying the Greek fathers in Constantinople.  After the Restoration he became Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge and chaplain to Charles II., who called him the best scholar in England.