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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158 SUSANNA WESLEY.<br />
not recommend taking thought for the morrow any<br />
further than is needful for our improvement of present<br />
opportunities in a prudent management of those talents<br />
God has committed to our trust ;<br />
and so far I think it<br />
is the duty of all to take thought for the morrow.<br />
of this<br />
And I heartily wish you may be well apprised<br />
For<br />
-while life is young.<br />
'<br />
Believe me, youth, (for I am read in cares,<br />
And bend beneath the weight of more than<br />
fifty years)/<br />
Believe me, dear Son, old age<br />
is the worst time we<br />
can choose to mend either our lives or our fortunes.<br />
If the foundations of solid piety are not laid betimes<br />
in sound principles and virtuous dispositions, and if we<br />
neglect, while strength and vigour lasts, to lay up<br />
something ere the infirmities of age overtake us, it is<br />
a hundred to one odds that we shall die both poor and<br />
wicked.<br />
" Ah !<br />
my dear son, did you with me stand on the<br />
verge of life, and saw before your eyes a vast expanse,<br />
an unlimited duration of being, which you might<br />
shortly enter upon, you can't conceive how all the inadvertencies,<br />
mistakes, and sins of youth would rise to<br />
your view ;<br />
and how different the sentiments of sensitive<br />
pleasures, the desire of sexes, and pernicious<br />
friendships of the world would be then from what they<br />
are now, while health is entire and seems to promise<br />
many years of life.<br />
"<br />
SUSANNA WESLEY."<br />
In the spring or early summer of 1731, Mr. Matthew<br />
<strong>Wesley</strong>, the elder brother of the Rector of Epworth,<br />
made a journey to Scarborough, accompanied only by<br />
a servant, and stayed to visit his relations on the way.
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