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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110 SUSANNA WESLEY.<br />
The next event in<br />
Mrs. <strong>Wesley</strong>'s<br />
life was the parting<br />
with her son John, who was placed at the<br />
Charterhouse through the good offices of the Duke<br />
of Buckingham, to whom his father and the circumstances<br />
of the family were well known. The mother<br />
does not appear to have corresponded with him so<br />
anxiously or frequently as with her elder son, or at<br />
all events, if she did so, none of her letters have been<br />
preserved.<br />
It is possible<br />
that she trusted him to<br />
some extent to the fostering care of his brother at<br />
Westminster, who was frequently able to see him, or<br />
perhaps she did not think his disposition called for<br />
such continual attention on her part. His father bade<br />
him run three times round the garden every morning,<br />
and he is said to have obeyed him dutifully, and he<br />
was probably not less careful to observe his mother's<br />
instructions as to his daily conduct and devotions.<br />
He did not need any stimulus to study, for the love of<br />
learning was part and parcel of his nature.<br />
No letters written by Mrs. <strong>Wesley</strong> to her son Samuel<br />
during the year he spent at Oxford are forthcoming,<br />
nor is there any record of her feelings and sympathies<br />
when he married in 1715. His wife was the daughter<br />
of the Rev. John Berry, one of the masters at Westminster,<br />
who took some of the scholars as boarders.<br />
He loved her very dearly, and, being by that time<br />
established as an usher in his old school, probably felt<br />
justified in taking a wife. It is not likely that his<br />
mother did not show a warm interest in this change<br />
in his life, and it is well known that he continued to<br />
be a most affectionate son, while his wife showed the<br />
utmost kindness and right feeling to his young<br />
brothers and to her mother-in-law. Samuel, junior,<br />
was as fond of writing rhyme<br />
as his father had been
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