Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/230

 sermons (London, 1527?), and into Latin from Greek Aristotle’s ‘De Mirabilibus Mundi,’ the tragedies of Euripides, and an oration of Isocrates. His friends, John Leland and John Parkhurst, complimented him on his erudition in Latin epigrams.

 CALAH, JOHN (1758–1798), organist and composer, was born in 1758, but his birth-place and early history are alike unknown. In December 1781 he succeeded John Jackson as organist of the parish church and master of the song-school of Newark-on-Trent, where he remained until 1785, on 28 June of which year he was appointed to the offices of organist and master of the choristers in the cathedral church of Peterborough, which were vacant by the resignation of Richard Langdon. Calah remained at Peterborough until his death, which took place on 5 Aug. 1798. He was buried on the 8th of the same month. He composed some unimportant church music, songs, sonatas, &c., but his works are now nearly forgotten.

 CALAMY, BENJAMIN, D.D. (1642–1686), prebendary of St. Paul's, was the second son of Edmund Calamy the elder [q. v.], and eldest son by his second wife, Anne Leaver. He was born in London on or before 8 June 1642. His mother, according to Tillotson, was a strong presbyterian. His education was begun at St. Paul's School. His father sent him, before 1660, to Catharine Hall, Cambridge, where he fully sustained the family reputation. At the Restoration, which his father had been active in promoting, Benjamin Calamy, with his younger brother James, adhered to the national church as re-established. The ejectment of his father and elder brother occurred while he was still an undergraduate, but his writings show that if he was alarmed into conformity, it was the sectarianism of the nonconformists, rather than their sufferings, which alarmed him. He graduated B.A. in 1664, M.A. in 1668, was elected fellow, and became ‘an ornament to the college’. Among his pupils was James Bonnell [q. v.] On 25 April 1677 he obtained the preferment from which his father had been ejected, the perpetual curacy of St. Mary Aldermanbury, in succession to Simon Ford, D.D. This appointment he owed to the interest of the notorious George Jeffries, then a leading man in the parish. He was soon appointed one of the king's chaplains in ordinary, and took his D.D. in 1680. 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. On 18 June 1685 he was installed in the prebend of Harleston in St. Paul's, vacated by the death of John Wells, D.D. His nephew thinks he now had ‘a fair prospect of the utmost preferment.’ But in the autumn of this year occurred the lamentable affair of Alderman Henry Cornish [q. v.], executed on 23 Oct., nominally for conspiracy, but really for the part he had taken in the discovery of the alleged ‘popish plot.’ Cornish was Calamy's parishioner; on his trial Calamy stood by him, and in the interval before his execution repeatedly pressed Jeffries to intercede for him. Jeffries is reported to have told Calamy at last that ‘a mine of gold as deep as the monument is high, and a bunch of pearls as big as the flames at the top of it,’ would not save Cornish. Up to the morning of his execution Calamy was in attendance upon the condemned man; he could not trust himself to accompany him to the scaffold. His nephew, who met him on his way from his last interview with 