LIST OF AUTHORITIES. Memorials of the Wesley Family. By the Rev. G. J. The Life of John Wesley. By the Rev. Luke Tyerman. 1870. Memoirs of the Wesley Family. By Dr. Adam Clarke. 1823. Life of Wesley. By Robert Southey. 1820. Original Letters by the Rev. John Wesley and his Life of Charles Wesley. By John Whitehead, M.D. The Mother of the Wesleys. By the Rev. John Kirk. The Wesley Banner. April and May, 1852. Mrs. Wesley's original Papers. SUSANNA WESLEY. CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND ANCESTRY. THE armies of the Church Militant throughout the world were never commanded by a better general than John Wesley. The military instinct was strong in every fibre of his keen mind and wiry body, and his genius for organizing has probably had far more to do with keeping the hosts of Methodism in vigorous marching order for the last hundred and fifty years than any of the tenets he inculcated. He had, moreover, the gift of an eloquence that was magnetic, that drew men after him as the multitudes followed Peter the Hermit, and that compelled self-surrender as did the teaching of Ignatius Loyola. He was a born leader of men, who went straight to his point, and carried it by force of personal superiority. He made a very effectual lieutenant of his brother Charles, who, had it not been for John, would probably have lived a peaceful, pious life, and been a diligently decorous parish priest with a spice of scholarly erudition, like his father before him. Men like John are not born in every generation, and when they do arise, are usually the outcome of a race which has shown talent in isolated instances, but has never before concentrated all its strength in one scion. In the records of such a race there are sure to be certain foreshadowings of the coming prophet, priest, or seer, and consequently the lives of his progenitors are full of the deepest interest. Boys usually reproduce vividly the characteristics of their mothers; so in the person of Susanna Wesley we should seek the hidden springs of the boundless energy and grasp of mind that made her son stand out so prominently as a man of mark among his fellows. Had it not been for him, it is probable that her memory would have perished; for, as far as outsiders saw, she was only the struggling wife of a poor country parson, with the proverbial quiverful of children, a narrow income, and an indomitable fund of what is termed proper pride. She was the twenty-fifth and youngest child of her father, Dr. Samuel Annesley, by his second wife, and was born in Spital Yard on the 20th of 1 January, 1669. On both sides of the house she was of gentle birth. Her mother's father, John White, born at Higlan in Pembrokeshire, like so many other Welshmen, graduated at Jesus College, Oxford; he afterwards studied at the Middle Temple and became a bencher. He was probably a sound lawyer and a prosperous man, for we find that he had a goodly number of Puritan clients, and in 1640 was elected member of Parliament for Southwark. In the House he was known as an active and stirring member of the party opposed to the King, Charles I., and in the proceedings that led to the death of that illfated monarch he seems to have taken some considerable share. He was by no means silent or passive when Episcopacy was under discussion, and would fain have seen the offices of deacons, priests, and bishops abolished. He was chairman of the Committee for Religion, and in that capacity had to consider the cases of one hundred clergymen who lived scandalous lives. These cases he published in a quarto volume of fifty-seven pages, a copy of which, under the title of "The First Century of Scandalous and Malignant Priests," may be seen in the British Museum. Mr. White was, moreover, a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines; and what with the excitement and |