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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SUSANNA<br />
WESLEY.<br />
CHAPTER I.<br />
BIRTH AND ANCESTRY.<br />
THE armies of the Church Militant throughout the<br />
world were never commanded by a better general than<br />
John <strong>Wesley</strong>. The military instinct was strong in<br />
every fibre of his keen mind and wiry body, and his<br />
genius for organizing has probably had far more to do<br />
with keeping the hosts of Methodism in vigorous<br />
marching order for the last hundred and fifty years, than<br />
any of the tenets he inculcated. He had, moreover,<br />
the gift of an eloquence that was magnetic, that drew<br />
men after him as the multitudes followed Peter the<br />
Hermit, and that compelled self-surrender as did the<br />
teaching of Ignatius Loyola. He was a born leader of<br />
men, who went straight to his point, and carried it<br />
by<br />
force of personal superiority. He made a very effectual<br />
lieutenant of his brother Charles, who, had it not<br />
been for John, would probably have lived a peaceful,<br />
pious life,<br />
and been a diligently decorous parish priest<br />
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