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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214 SUSANNA WESLEY.<br />
A memorandum on the back of this note,<br />
in John<br />
<strong>Wesley</strong>'s own hand, affirms that it was answered on the<br />
18th, but that answer has not been<br />
" "<br />
preserved. JefEery<br />
was an agent who usually proclaimed himself by raps<br />
and noises, and since, on the 8th of February, about a<br />
week previous to the date of the note, London had<br />
been thrown into confusion and alarm by a smart<br />
shock of earthquake, persons whose faith in the<br />
supernatural is not very strong, may be pardoned for<br />
imagining that Mrs. Harper may have mistaken noises<br />
produced by that convulsion of nature for those by<br />
which the sprite of Epworth had been in the habit of<br />
manifesting its presence.<br />
When the <strong>Wesley</strong>an body took the well-known<br />
chapel in West Street, Mrs. Harper and the old servant<br />
removed to the house which joined it, and took<br />
up their abode in rooms which communicated with the<br />
chapel by means of a gallery behind the pulpit and<br />
a window which, when thrown open, enabled the inmates<br />
to join in the services without being seen themselves.<br />
Mrs. Harper became a kindly and much<br />
subdued old lady when she had lost her memory, and<br />
died from general decay of nature in 1771, when<br />
nearly eighty years of age.<br />
It will be remembered that <strong>Susanna</strong> <strong>Wesley</strong>, the<br />
second daughter of the Epworth family, married<br />
Richard Ellison in 1721, and that, though in fairly<br />
good circumstances, he was always considered an unpleasant<br />
son-in-law. When the four children born of<br />
this union were grown or growing up, a fire occurred<br />
in Mr. Ellison's house, and from that time his wife<br />
refused to live with him, and resided with first one<br />
and then another of her sons and daughters in<br />
London. The deserted husband tried by every means
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