Susanna Wesley

THE HOME REBUILT. 95
During the ensuing summer Samuel, then" twenty
years of age, and a scholar of whom Westminster
was justly proud, attracted the attention of Dr.
Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, and prebend of Westminster,
who had himself been a distinguished Westminster
scholar in his youth. He was old, and had a
kindly feeling for the boy whose grandfather had
been his own college friend, and whose father had
received ordination at his hands. He took him down
of it
to his country house as reader. Samuel did not appreciate
his new position, and even complained
to his father, calling the Bishop " an unfriendly friend/'
His first patron soon died, and was succeeded in the
see of Rochester by Dr. Atterbury, Dean of Westminster,
who took quite as much interest in Samuel
as his predecessor had done, and won his affection
and partisanship so thoroughly that they endured
throughout life, undiminished by the circumstances
which ultimately led to the Bishop's exile. This prelate,
when at Oxford, had been at Christ Church;
and it was by his advice and persuasion that Samuel
Wesley entered himself a student at that college in
1711. His father and mother must have been more
than mortal if they had not felt some amount of pride
in the boy, who had thus won the friendship of two
men who were ripe scholars as well as high dignitaries
of the Church. There is, however, no trace of exultation
on either side, and early in December Samuel wrote to
his mother a letter beginning "Dear Mother," instead
of the formal " Madam " of the period. This
seems to have touched her, and added warmth to the
epistle which the gravity of so great an impending
change as leaving school and going to Oxford called
forth :