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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199<br />
CHAPTER XV.<br />
LAST YEARS.<br />
THE news of Samuel <strong>Wesley</strong>'s death was communicated<br />
by a friend and neighbour to Charles, who was then at<br />
Bristol, and probably also to John at the Foundry.<br />
The latter had often been rallied by his relatives on<br />
his reticence as to family matters, and it<br />
appears<br />
that he actually started off to meet Charles and go<br />
with him to Tiverton to see their widowed sister-inlaw<br />
without communicating the sad news to his<br />
mother, who was ill in her own room. Very likely<br />
he had not the heart to do so, for all the family knew<br />
how dearly she loved her first-born, and what a pattern<br />
son he had been to her. Possibly he commissioned<br />
one of his sisters to tell her gently. How she bore it<br />
she herself told Charles :<br />
" DEAR CHARLES, " November 29th, 1739.<br />
" Upon the first hearing of your brother's death,<br />
I did immediately acquiesce in the will of God, without<br />
the least reluctance. Only I marvelled that Jacky did<br />
not inform me of it before he left, since he knew<br />
thereof; but he was unacquainted with the manner of<br />
God's dealing with me in extraordinary cases, which,
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