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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26 SUSANNA WESLEY.<br />
It was a rapid and pleasant process, for she wrote that<br />
" he had such a prodigious memory that I do not<br />
remember to have told him the same word twice.<br />
What was more strange, any word he had learned<br />
in his lesson he knew wherever he saw it,<br />
Bible or any other book, by which means he learned<br />
very soon to read an English author well." For two<br />
and from her<br />
years or so, Samuel was her only pupil,<br />
either in his<br />
experience with him she never attempted to teach any<br />
of her children the alphabet<br />
till<br />
they were turned five,<br />
although the youngest of all, Kezia, picked up her<br />
letters before that age. Her mother regretted this,<br />
and said it was none of her doing, but reading must<br />
have been in the atmosphere. Mrs. <strong>Wesley</strong>'s ninth<br />
child was born at Ep worth in 1698, but, the parish<br />
registers having been destroyed by fire, it is not known<br />
whether it was a boy or girl. This child speedily<br />
died, and the next addition to the family was a John<br />
who was followed the next year by a Benjamin, both<br />
of whom died in infancy.<br />
It appears that during the earlier part of the time at<br />
Epworth, Mr. <strong>Wesley</strong>'s aged mother lived with him r<br />
and was, probably, a valuable assistance to the young<br />
wife, who always had a baby coming, and was frequently<br />
confined to her room and couch for six months<br />
at a time, though, as she rarely had more than one<br />
maidservant for all purposes, she must have managed<br />
the children even in her moments of greatest weakness,<br />
and it was this perpetual strain of mind and body that<br />
added so much to her feebleness.<br />
On the 16th of May 1701, husband and wife took<br />
counsel together. Money was terribly scarce and<br />
coals were wanted, for, though<br />
it was almost summer,<br />
it would not have done to be without firing when
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