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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YO UTH AND MARR IA GE. 1$<br />
written squibs and lampoons on the opposite side of<br />
the question, and the scars of persecution and controversy<br />
were still too recent to enable the friends who<br />
had hitherto watched his career, to reflect that " our<br />
little systems have their day" and ultimately "cease<br />
to be."<br />
Hearts are the same in all centuries, and, considering<br />
that <strong>Susanna</strong> <strong>Wesley</strong> was some years younger than<br />
her future husband, one cannot help thinking that<br />
Cupid had something to do with the change of views<br />
she avowed so early in her teens, and that her kind<br />
and warm-hearted father had some suspicion of the<br />
truth, and no objection to it.<br />
Samuel <strong>Wesley</strong> did not care to encounter home<br />
opposition ; consequently, he rose before dawn one<br />
August morning in 1683, and with forty-five shillings<br />
in his pocket walked down to Oxford, where he entered<br />
himself as a servitor at Exeter College. Here<br />
he maintained himself by teaching, by writing exercises,<br />
&c. that wealthy undergraduates were too idle to<br />
do for themselves (a practice he ought not to have<br />
countenanced), by whatever literary employment Dunton<br />
could put into his hands, and by collecting<br />
and publishing his various scattered rhymes and<br />
poems in a volume, which appears to have rather more<br />
than paid<br />
its own expenses. He passed his various<br />
examinations creditably, and in June 1688 took his<br />
B.A. degree. The fact that he was the only student<br />
of Exeter who obtained that very moderate distinction<br />
in that year, does not say much for the abilities or<br />
industry of his companions as a body.<br />
Samuel <strong>Wesley</strong> left Oxford just at the time when<br />
James II. had issued his fresh Declaration of Indulgence,<br />
which the clergy for the most part refused to
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