AN ARGUMENT OF PROVIDENCE

ANOTHER argument of providence and counsel relating to animals is the various kinds of voices the same animal uses on divers occasions, and to different purposes. Hen birds, for example, have a peculiar sort of voice when they would call the male; which is so eminent in quails, that it is taken notice of by men, who by counterfeiting this voice with a quail-pipe, easily draw the cocks into their snares. The common hen, all the while she is broody, sits, and leads her chickens, uses a voice which we call clocking; another she employs when she calls her chickens to partake of any food she hath found for them, upon hearing whereof they speedily run to her; another when upon sight of a bird of prey, or apprehension of any danger, she would save them, bidding them as it were to shift for themselves, whereupon they speedily run away, and seek shelter among bushes, or in the thick grass, or elsewhere dispersing themselves far and wide. These actions do indeed necessarily infer knowledge and intention of, and direction to the ends and uses to which they serve, not in the birds themselves, but in a superior agent, who hath put an instinct in them of using such a voice upon such an occasion; and in the young, of doing that upon hearing of it, which by Providence was intended. Other voices she hath when angry, when she hath laid an egg, when in pain or in great fear, all significant; which may more easily be accounted for, as being effects of the several passions of anger, grief, fear, joy; which yet are all argumentative of Providence intending their several significations and uses.

(From The Wisdom of God in the Creation.)

HURLING

THERE are two kinds of hurling, the in-hurling and the outhurling. In the first there are chosen 20 or 25 of a side, and

two goals are set up; then comes one with a small hard leather ball in his hand, and tosses it up in the midst between both parties; he that catches it endeavours to run with it to the furthermost goal; if he be stopped by one of the opposite side, he either saith I will stand, and wrestles with him, letting fall the ball by him (which one of the opposite side must not take up, but one of his own) or else throws away the ball to one of his own side (if any of them can catch it). He that is stopped may chose whether he may wrestle, or throw away the ball; but it is more generous to wrestle. He that stops must answer, and wrestle it out. When any one wrestles, one of his side takes up the ball, and runs with it towards the goal, till he be stopped, and then, as before, he either wrestles or throws away the ball, so that there are commonly many pairs wrestling. An out-hurling is played by one parish against another, or eastern men against western, or Devonshire men against Cornish; the manner they enter upon it is as follows:-—Any one that can get leave of a justice, etc., goes into a market town, with a little wooden ball in his hand, plated over with silver, and there proclaims the hurling, and mentions the time and place. They play in the same manner as in the other, only they make the churches their goals, that party which can cast the ball into, or upon a church, wins. (From the Itineraries.)

ISAAC BARROW

[Isaac Barrow, a great mathematician in an age of great mathematicians, a great preacher in an age of great preachers, and a great theologian in an age of great theologians, was born in London in 1630. His father, Thomas Barrow (who outlived Isaac and shared with Tillotson the task of editing his works), was "linen draper to Charles I.," and so steady a royalist that he shared the exile of his master's son. Barrow, whose uncle and namesake, later Governor and Bishop of Man and Bishop of St. Asaph, was a fellow of Peterhouse at Cambridge, was entered at that college after a youth spent partly at Charterhouse (where he gained the name of a terrible fighter), and partly at Felstead where his great intellectual capacities first appeared. He shared to the full the political principles of his family; and, his uncle having been ejected, he went, not to Peterhouse but to Trinity, where his Cavalier tenets were the only fault found with him. He was, however, elected Fellow in 1649. He was soon famous as a scholar, and would have been made Greek Professor as early as 1654, but for his Cavalier and Arminian principles. Then he went abroad and travelled for four years on the coasts of the Mediterranean, having some adventures. In 1659 the Greek professorship was actually conferred on him, but he was as expert in science as in scholarship, and having been one of the first fellows of the Royal Society, he was in 1662 appointed Gresham Professor of Geometry in London, and next year Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. This post in 1669 he resigned in favour of his pupil Newton. In 1672 Charles the Second, who had a great admiration for his preaching, made him Master of Trinity. He was chiefly instrumental in founding the famous library of that College; was Vice-Chancellor in 1675, and two years later died while on an official visit to London in connection with the Westminster scholarships at Trinity, being then only forty-seven. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His nonmathematical works, printed and reprinted in folio, came at last into a standard edition by the good offices of the Clarendon Press at Oxford, in 1830. was some time later before his own University paid him the debt it owed; but the Rev. Alexander Napier (afterwards known as editor of Boswell) thoroughly re-edited the theological works at Cambridge in 1859, and Dr. Whewell, the mathematical, a year later.]

It

BARROW'S work, as it was published chiefly after his death, consists of three parts—the mathematical treatises (which do not

concern us at all, but which were thought remarkable even in the century of Descartes, Pascal, and Newton), the Latin works in prose and verse (which, though not directly part of our subject, have a very close connection with it), and the English works proper. The largest single item of these latter is his posthumous Treatise of the Pope's Supremacy; besides which he left an Exposition of the Creed, which has been somewhat overshadowed by the similar work of his contemporary Pearson, and some minor tractates. But by far the larger part of the English works, as a whole, consists of Sermons. Considerable numbers of these are themselves connected in series, the longest of which connects itself with the above-mentioned Exposition by being devoted to the Creed. Barrow had the reputation of being a most unmercifully long-winded preacher; and the best known anecdote about him is that on one occasion in Westminster Abbey he preached for three hours and a half, till the desperate congregation managed to get the organist to "play him down." His published sermons are not on an average very long; but a few of them are, and it does not require very elaborate examination even of the others to discover signs that their author might easily have been prone to "take the other glass," as the play of words went in his own time. For the characteristics of Barrow are neither the gorgeous rhetoric of Taylor, which almost necessarily involves careful preparation and a sort of intellectual exhaustion after it is evolved, nor the sharp sarcasm and scholastic criticism of South, which almost necessarily imply succinctness and concentration. It is true that Barrow is not in the least exposed to the charge of slip-shod style, or of fluent verbosity. But his sermons are less the workings out of a single argument than the outpouring of an extraordinarily well-stored mind in the discussion and inculcation of moral truth and religious duty. The moral side, indeed the side of conduct-is very strong in Barrow, so strong as sometimes to give an eighteenth, rather than a seventeenth, century tone and colour to his handling. This had no doubt something to do with his strong anti-Calvinism. He was as uncompromisingly Arminian as he was uncompromisingly orthodox and one of his finest series of sermons is that which vindicates the Arminian "Doctrine of universal redemption," not of course to the extent of Origenism, but maintaining the unlimited efficacy and applicability of the sacrifice of Christ. Nothing seems to kindle Barrow's style, or to attract his energies