Susanna Wesley
This is the story of Susanna Wesley, 1669-1742 Mother of Charles and John Wesley, who were founders of the Methodist Church. Susanna and her husband, Samuel, had nineteen children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. Her son Charles became a well-known hymn writer and her son John became the found of Methodism. Susanna was brought up in a Puritan home as the youngest of twenty-five children. As a teenager, she became a member of the Church of England. She became the wife of a chronically debt-ridden parish rector in an English village. She said, "I have had a large experience of what the world calls adverse fortune." Nonetheless, Susanna managed to pass down to her children Christian principles that stayed with them.
This is the story of Susanna Wesley, 1669-1742 Mother of Charles and John Wesley, who were founders of the Methodist Church. Susanna and her husband, Samuel, had nineteen children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. Her son Charles became a well-known hymn writer and her son John became the found of Methodism.
Susanna was brought up in a Puritan home as the youngest of twenty-five children. As a teenager, she became a member of the Church of England. She became the wife of a chronically debt-ridden parish rector in an English village. She said, "I have had a large experience of what the world calls adverse fortune." Nonetheless, Susanna managed to pass down to her children Christian principles that stayed with them.
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THE HOME REBUILT. 89<br />
ishe spent in lodgings while the parsonage was being<br />
rebuilt.<br />
The Rector was away during a great part of the first<br />
year spent by his wife and family in the new house.<br />
His busy brain was never allowed to rust or vegetate,<br />
and he was, of course, glad to earn whatever he could<br />
by his pen.<br />
Events of considerable political importance were<br />
taking place in London during 1709, and, from various<br />
causes, the Duke of Marlborough was losing his popularity.<br />
The nation was getting tired of the war with<br />
France, which Dean Swift declared had cost<br />
"six millions<br />
of supplies and almost fifty millions of debt"; and<br />
Marlborough, who had long been in the position of a<br />
"Tory man bringing in Whig measures," as Lord<br />
Beaconsfield puts it, was accused of continuing the<br />
struggle with Louis Quatorze for his own enrichment<br />
and aggrandisement. The Tories regarded him as a<br />
traitor to his party, and aggravated every little incident<br />
that could strengthen their own power. Dr. Henry<br />
Sacheverell, rector of St. Saviour, Southwark, was<br />
a popular and prominent High Church clergyman of<br />
the day, narrow-minded and violent, especially against<br />
Dissenters. At the summer assizes at Derby he<br />
preached a very exciting sermon before the judges,<br />
and on the 5th of November, in St. Paul's Cathedral,<br />
he declaimed in a most inflammatory manner against<br />
toleration and the Dissenters, who were evidently his<br />
pet aversion ; declared that the Church was in danger<br />
from avowed enemies and false friends ;<br />
and altogether<br />
raised such a commotion that his sermons, which were<br />
published under the protection of the Lord Mayor<br />
-and were widely circulated, were complained of to the<br />
House of Commons as containing positions contrary
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