A Discourse Concerning Conscience [The First Part + The Second Part]; bound with: A Discourse about a Scrupulous Conscience Containing some Plain Directions for the Cure of It; bound with: Some Considerations about the Case of Scandal, or Giving Offence to Weak Brethren.

Hardcover, speckled leather binding with newer leather spine, 7-7/8" x 6", 46 + 99 + 38 + 50 pp. Wear to lower edges of boards, small loss at tail of spine and boards near spine. Text itself is clean and solidly bound. From the Dictionary of National Biography on Benjamin Calamy: " In 1683 the publication of his ?Discourse about a Doubting [the second edition has ?Scrupulous?] Conscience,? dedicated to Jeffries, made a great noise. He had already preached it twice with great applause, once to his own parishioners, and again at Bow Church. His text (Luke xi. 41) gave occasion for expounding his habitual thesis, that the best church is the one which leads men to subordinate everything else to humble and practical piety. The sting of the sermon lay in Calamy's quotations from Baxter and from his own father; the former having declared that ?thousands are gone to hell,? the latter that ?all our church calamities have sprung? from forsaking the parish churches. Calamy's sermon was accepted as a challenge to nonconformists by a baptist schoolmaster, Thomas de Laune [q. v.], who brought out ?A Plea for the Nonconformists,? 1683, a pithy and trenchant performance. Its publication cost its author his liberty, and indeed his life. Although Calamy did not choose to answer the letters which De Laune wrote to him from Newgate, he made interest in his behalf, and his failure to obtain De Laune's release ?was no small trouble to him,? as his nonconformist nephew testifies. For his ?scrupulous conscience? sermon Calamy was rewarded in 1683 by the dean and chapter of St. Paul's with the vicarage of St. Lawrence Jewry, with St. Mary Magdalene, Milk Street, annexed." Wing S2972, S2973, C213 & C225.…