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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PARTINGS. 169<br />
proper to your maturer judgment; ever remaining<br />
your Honour's most sincere and most obliged friend<br />
and servant,<br />
" SAMUEL WESLEY."<br />
John Whitelamb, however, did not go to Georgia,<br />
but spent most of his time at Epworth during the<br />
months of pain and feebleness that preceded Mr. <strong>Wesley</strong>'s<br />
death, though he seems to have made so long an<br />
absence, probably at Oxford, that Mrs. <strong>Wesley</strong> inquired<br />
of her sons about him. He ultimately returned to<br />
Wroote, where he lived a retired and studious life for<br />
thirty years, dying in 1769. He did not quite agree<br />
with John and Charles <strong>Wesley</strong> on religious subjects,<br />
which they did not very well like, and the whole family<br />
dropped their intercourse with him.<br />
That the mother was afraid lest Martha should lose<br />
her comfortable home with her uncle Matthew is shown<br />
by a short letter dated February 21, 1732, and written<br />
on the same sheet as the one to John in which she detailed<br />
her famous system of education :<br />
" DEAR CHARLES,<br />
" Though you have not had time to tell me so<br />
since we parted, yet I hope you are in health ;<br />
and<br />
when you are more at leisure, I shall be glad to hear<br />
.you are so from yourself. I should be pleased enough<br />
to see you here this spring, if it were not upon the<br />
hard condition of your walking hither but that<br />
;<br />
always terrifies me, and I am commonly so uneasy for<br />
fear you should kill yourself with coming so far on<br />
foot, that it destroys much of the pleasure I should<br />
otherwise have in conversing with you.<br />
" I fear poor Patty has several enemies at London,
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