e. 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