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Excerpt from The Complete Works of Stephen Charnock, Vol. 1
The memorials of the life of Charnock are much scantier than those who have profited by his writings, or who are interested in the history of the time, could wish. We have some notices of him in the sermon preached at his funeral by his bosom friend Mr Johnson; a vague general account of him in an epistle To the Keader, prefixed by Mr Adams and Mr Veal, the editors, to his Discourse of Divine Providence, published shortly after his death; a brief life of him by Calamy in his 1 Account of the Ejected and Silenced; his collegiate positions detailed by Wood in his Athena Oxonienses and Fasti; and this is all the original matter that we have been able to discover regarding the author of the great work On the Attributes. Mr Johnson says, he heard a narrative of his life would be drawn up by an able hand; and Calamy mentions that Memoirs of Mr Steph. Charnock were written by Mr John Gunter, his chamber-fellow at Oxford; but of these we have not been able to find any trace. We have made researches in London, in Cambridge, and in Dublin, without being rewarded by the discovery of many new facts, not given by the original authorities. All that we have aimed at in the following Memoir is to combine the scattered accounts of him, to allot the incidents the proper place in his life and in the general history of the times, and thus to furnish, if not a full, yet a faithful, picture of the man and his work. Stephen Charnock was born in the parish of Saint Catherine Cree (or Creechurch), London, in the year 1628. He was the son of Mr Eichard Charnock, a solicitor, who was descended from an ancient Lancashire family, the Charnocks of Charnock. We have no account of his childish or boyish years, or of his training in the family. But we know what was the spirit that reigned around him among the great body of the middle classes The writer is under deep obligations to the Rev. Alexander B.Grosart, Kinross; the Eev. Dr Halley, New College, London; Joshua Wilson, Esq., Tunbridge Wells; and Charles Henry Cooper, Esq., author of the Annals of Cambridge, for directing him in his researches.
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