Five volumes · 55 discourses · cited to volume and printed page
The complete Works of Stephen Charnock read end to end, hunting one thing: the claim that stops a reader cold. Surprising permissions, surprising prohibitions, knife-edge distinctions, inversions, hard sayings, epigrams, exegetical surprises. He is remembered for one enormous book on the attributes of God, and the reputation that comes with it is exhaustiveness. That reputation is earned and it is also misleading. Every quotation below was checked verbatim against the printed page, and no quote crosses a page break, a running head, or an editorial footnote.
The heat is not where the reputation says it is. Volume by volume, the sharpest material sits in the application sections rather than the doctrine: the long orderly proofs of an attribute yield little, and then he turns the attribute on the reader and it bites. The largest single discourse in this collection is not one of the attributes at all but the efficient of regeneration, and the hottest pages in five volumes are the ones where he argues from the size of a man's sin rather than against it.
He did not publish the book he is known for. Charnock died in 1680, and the discourses on God's existence and attributes were assembled from his sermon notes and printed two years later. What is collected here is the whole of him, the attributes and the regeneration series and the sacramental discourses and the two sermons his editors appended, so every take is cited to its volume and its printed page rather than to a title he chose.