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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4 SUSANNA WESLEY.<br />
a saintly grandmother who was called to her rest before<br />
his birth. He was born in 1620 at Haseley in Warwickshire,<br />
and inherited a considerable amount of pro-<br />
He had the misfortune to lose his father when<br />
perty.<br />
only four years old, and was brought up by his mother,<br />
who seems to have been an eminently pious woman.<br />
Religion, it must be remembered, was the burning<br />
question of the day, and Puritanism was at its height ;<br />
though there were many godly and exemplary people<br />
in the opposite, or what we should now call the High<br />
Church party. Young Annesley entered at Queen's<br />
College, Oxford, at the age of fifteen, acquitted himself<br />
well there, and in due course took his M.A. degree.<br />
When he was twenty-four years of age and had deliberately<br />
chosen the Church as his profession, the affairs<br />
of the nation had reached a crisis. Charles I. had declared<br />
war against the Parliament, and his queen had<br />
sailed from Dover with the crown jewels, hoping to<br />
sell them, and thereby procure munitions of war for<br />
the husband to whom she was so deeply attached.<br />
The Royalist party withdrew from their seats in the<br />
House of Commons, whereupon the remaining members<br />
drew closer together, enrolled the militia, and appointed<br />
the Earl of Warwick Admiral of the Fleet. He it was<br />
who, having a kindness for his young county neighbour,<br />
and receiving a certificate of his ordination signed by<br />
seven clergymen, procured for him his diploma as LL.D.<br />
and appointed him chaplain to a man-of-war called<br />
the Globe. This post, however, did not suit Samuel<br />
Annesley, and we speedily find that he quitted it and<br />
accepted the living of Cliffe in Kent, worth about four<br />
hundred pounds a year. This cure had been left<br />
vacant by the sequestration of the previous vicar for<br />
immorality, so that his appointment probably marks
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