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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LAST TEARS. 209<br />
True daughter of affliction, she,<br />
Inured to pain and misery,<br />
Mourned a long night of grief and fears,<br />
A legal night of seventy years.<br />
The Father then revealed His Son,<br />
Him in the broken bread made known ;<br />
She knew and felt her sins forgiven,<br />
And found the earnest of her heaven.<br />
Meet for the fellowship above,<br />
She heard the call '<br />
Arise, my love.'<br />
I come, her dying looks replied,<br />
And lamb-like, as her Lord, she died."<br />
It was curious that the usually precise Johii<br />
neither mentioned his father on this tomb-stone,<br />
nor put the date of his mother's birth or death.<br />
He busied himself, however, in having a copperplate<br />
engraving made of a very good likeness of<br />
her taken during her later years. A copy of this<br />
forms the frontispiece to Kirk's Mother of the<br />
<strong>Wesley</strong>s, and is seen in miniature at the commencement<br />
of Mr. Stevenson's Memorials of the <strong>Wesley</strong><br />
Family. There is also a miniature extant which<br />
shows something of what she was like in her<br />
prime. Among her far-away<br />
descendants there are<br />
one or two women who resemble her very closely<br />
appearance.<br />
The original tomb-stone having become much defaced<br />
by time and weather, in 1828, when memorial<br />
tablets<br />
to the memory of several distinguished Methodists<br />
were put up in the City Road Chapel at the<br />
expense of the <strong>Wesley</strong>an Book Committee, a new<br />
stone, with a fresh inscription, was set up over Mrs.<br />
<strong>Wesley</strong>'s grave. Reverence for their sweet singer did<br />
14<br />
in
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