Introduction

Introduction

Introduction ho is Susanna Wesley? The quick and obvious response is John Wesley's mother, the woman behind the founder of Methodism in eighteenth-century

England. True as far as it goes, this answer nevertheless limits her appeal to a smaller audience than she deserves. Moreover, it perpetuates the assumption of her own day that a woman's identity derives from her relationships with close male relatives.

It would be a pity if late-twentieth-century interpretation would follow lateseventeenthand the early-eighteenth-century commonplace and represent her only as the daughter of a prominent Nonconformist minister, Samuel Annesley; as the wife of an Anglican priest who never quite became prominent, Samuel Wesley; and as the mother of Methodist founders John and Charles Wesley, whose undeniable prominence first brought her widespread recognition. Of course, in her day such relationships were underwritten and carefully constructed by contemporary piety, and how much more so for a woman attached to clergy in all demographic directions. Today piety continues to be part of the reason her identity is still dependent on the men in her life. But another factor in our less religious age is the practice of history, which has made useful beginnings but has still not succeeded in recovering the stories of all the notable women or in fully describing women's experience in the past.

Who is Susanna Wesley? In different communities of interpretation she has been a Methodist saint, an archetype of evangelical womanhood, and even (in a certain psychological reading) an overweening mother who prevented her son from experiencing any marital happiness.' Most recently, however, as feminist approaches have claimed scholarly prerogatives in literary and historical, as well as religious, studies, her identity is ripe for reinterpretation. There are stirrings that suggest she is becoming something of a foremother for latter-day Christian feminists and an example of early "writing women" who employed intellect and spirituality to subvert (however gently) some of the very religious-based conventions that ordinarily worked to keep women modest, chaste, and silent. Until now, those who would like to pursue such explorations (and could not make forays to the archival collections) have had

Susanna Wesley to work from secondary sources and scattered, incomplete, and sometimes unreliable transcriptions of her own writing.'

In pulling together material for this collection, I am assuming that Susanna Wesley's own writings allow her finally to speak for herself and yield a richer and fuller identity than she has ever been accorded before. Not that any edition, however complete and however judiciously prepared, can ever avoid constructing her or at least shaping her and in some way prejudicing our interpretation of her. Nor for that matter can archives boast a complete lack of bias—the letters and other papers that survive already represent a process of selection, dependent partly on the reflected glory of her famous son and the concerns of his admiring successors. Despite all that, we still have a remarkably rich collection from which to work. There is no reason that Susanna Wesley's own voice should not be heard; assessed; and brought into historical, literary, and theological conversations at the turn of the third millennium.

This new edition will no doubt spark many more readings of her work and life.

Some will continue to approach her from within the Wesleyan tradition and find in her writings further corroboration for her status as a sort of Methodist Madonna.

Others, prompted (as I have been) by a concern to recover the works of women in various religious traditions, will delve into these pages for clues to women's struggles and triumphs in more restrictive times and places. Still others, with little commitment to faith or particular interest in the study of religious history, will nevertheless read Susanna Wesley's religious writings as discourse that encouraged woman's

- education and afforded some psychic space, some "room of one's own," for her own self-expression and self-development.*? With such readers in mind, I have striven to provide as complete and accurate a collection as possible, edited from holographic and manuscript sources whenever available, and furnished with all necessary annotations and contextual information. It is, I believe, a step in the enriching process of reclaiming another woman's voice from the past.

The rest of this general introduction will attempt to sketch and characterize Susanna Wesley's life and suggest how both religious studies and literary historical studies can profit from examining her—and perhaps in the process can contribute to a fuller picture of her. More detailed introductory material, appropriate to the particular writings, will appear in each major part and subsection of the collection.

Biographical Sketch The epitaph on her original tombstone identified Susanna Wesley as "the youngest and last surviving daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley.'* Born on 20 January 1669,° she was part of a large family, as an anecdote reported by her eccentric brother-in-law

John Dunton amply illustrates. At her baptism (or possibly her younger brother's)when the officiating minister asked Dr. Annesley how many children he had, the answer was a slightly uncertain "two dozen or a quarter of a hundred."® Traces of "only" nine of the Annesley children have turned up in recent research, suggesting that less than half survived infancy, seven girls and two boys. Apart from Susanna, we know little about them, though there are intriguing snippets in Dun-

Introduction

ton's autobiography and in a funeral sermon for her sister Elizabeth, Dunton's wife.'

There is even less information on Annesley's two wives, Mary Hill (d. 1646) and Susanna's mother, Mary (?)White (d. 1693), though contextual evidence indicates that the latter was, like her youngest daughter, pious, educated, and energetic.®

Inevitably, we know quite a bit more about Susanna's father." Graduating from Oxford in 1639, he was ordained in Presbyterian fashion and served as a chaplain in the parliamentary navy before settling down as rector of Cliffe in Kent. Additional service at sea kept him away from his parish temporarily, but he soon lost it completely, probably because of his opposition to the execution of Charles I and the fact that there was no great love lost between him and Cromwell. Annesley then moved to London, briefly taking a small parish before being appointed (by Oliver's son

Richard) to the important living of St. Giles, Cripplegate. For nine years he distinguished himself as a preacher and an editor of a sermon series he hosted in the church.

At the Restoration, however, he was ejected from St. Giles in 1662 for conscientiously refusing subscription to the Book of Common Prayer according to Act of Uniformity. Following the practice of many other displaced Puritans, he organized a congregation of like-minded Nonconformists, occasionally running afoul of the laws penalizing such religious Dissenters. His large Presbyterian congregation gathered in Spitalfields, less than a mile east of St. Giles. Though the church no longer survives, Annesley's nearby house still stands; here he lived; here he worked in his well-stocked study; here his last daughter, Susanna, was born and raised; and here he died in 1696.'° Among his friends and colleagues were numbered all the prominent Nonconformists of the day, including Richard Baxter, and among his parishioners was Daniel Defoe, who published a flattering obituary, extolling him for the "Greatness of his Soul.""?

This quality served him particularly well when his daughter Susanna precociously decided to forsake Nonconformity and join the Church of England, the ostensible cause of his persecution. '* As she indicated in a letter to her son Samuel, this leavetaking was rather remarkable—not only for her youth but also for the methodical way in which she researched and decided the issue.!? Remarkable, too, was the equanimity with which her father-responded; as his library shows, he had something of what his most famous grandson would later describe as a "catholic spirit."

Whatever Samuel Annesley's inner hurt, Susanna "departed" with his blessing and remained his favorite daughter, receiving all his letters and papers at his death. Lacking further evidence, we can only speculate about her mother's impact on her education and development. However, we can be sure of the powerful gift her father gave her when he affirmed the conscientious choice of an adolescent daughter, even if it registered as a dissent against his cherished Dissenting tradition.

Young Susanna Annesley's ecclesiastical migration from Nonconformity to the Church of England coincided with a similar move made by a young theological student from Dorset, one Samuel Wesley.'* She met him at the time of her sister

Elizabeth's wedding to John Dunton in 1682, possibly at the ceremony itself. Some half-dozen years her senior, he was not only the son but also the grandson of Nonconformist ministers. Like her, and notwithstanding subsidized training in two

London Dissenting academies, he also sought membership in the established church.

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Introduction

As a man, this afforded him one advantage that Susanna could not have: the opportunity to pursue an ecclesiastical career by matriculating at one of the universities. '°

He did so, entering Exeter College, Oxford, in 1684; graduating with a B. A. in 1688; and receiving deacon's and priest's orders in the Church of England by 1689.

Meanwhile, intellectual and theological affinity had grown, '° as had their love, and the two lapsed Dissenters were married in the parish church of St. Marylebone on 12 November 1688. Thus began a 46 year marriage, ending with Samuel's death in 1735. As many of the collected letters and journals reveal, it was not always a smooth relationship; but on the whole it probably deserves the label Lawrence Stone has attached to the more enlightened, affective liaisons of the day, a "companionate marriage." '7

A temporary curacy at St. Botolph's, Aldersgate, did not bring much in the way of financial support, so the young couple lived in the Annesley household. This arrangement proved useful when Samuel Wesley signed on for a six-month naval chaplaincy (considerably more lucrative than parish work for a beginning clergyman), leaving Susanna behind in her first of many pregnancies. Following the birth of their first son, Samuel Jr., at the Annesleys', Wesley was invited to fill another curacy, this one south of the Thames at Newington Butts, Surrey. There he served for a year and rented lodgings for himself, Susanna, and young Samuel.'® Still unable to make ends meet, he picked up some literary work on the side; considered emigrating to Virginia; and finally secured his first living in the summer of 1691, the parish of South Ormsby, Lincolnshire.'"

Off today's main road between Louth and Skegness, about 25 miles east of the cathedral city of Lincoln and 150 miles from London, South Ormsby is still in the rural heart of the Lincolnshire wolds. For city-born Susanna, this was a radical change of scene. In this setting, financial problems did not abate, and they were exacerbated by other woes, borne more directly, one imagines, by Susanna. As Samuel Wesley wrote to a friend in 1692

This [i.e., the expense of buying "all sorts of household stuff" together] with first fruits, Taxes, my wives lying in about last Christmass & threatening to do the same the next, & two children & as many servants to provide for (my wife being sickly, having had 3 or 4 touches of her Rheumatism again

.) yet has and still does.

. Reduce Me to greater Extremitys.

."° The two children spoken of would have been the young Samuel, whom they brought with them from London, and their first. daughter, Susanna, born in South

Ormsby but also buried there not long after her first birthday. The "threatened" child turned out to be Emilia, their oldest surviving daughter. And four more followed: twin boys, Annesley and Jedidiah, who lived a month and a year, respectively; and two girls, a second Susanna and Mary, , both of whom survived into adulthood.

One other detail from the family's sojourn at South Ormsby merits inclusion to show the young priest's penchant for getting himself into trouble: the scrupulous rector lost his job by directly confronting the mistress of his patron. As John Wesley later recalled the family story, Samuel was incensed by the woman's attempts to pay social calls on Susanna:

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Introduction

Coming in one day, and finding this intrusive visitant sitting with my mother, he went up to her, took her by the hand, and fairly handed her out. The nobleman resented the affront so outrageously as to make it necessary for my father to resign the living.*!

A principled but perhaps ill-advised response to local custom, such behavior would bring continuing problems to the Wesley family in their new parish.

Epworth was in its own way more isolated than South Ormsby, situated some 30 miles north of Lincoln in the Isle of Axholme, fen country drained earlier in the century by Dutch engineers. The king presented Wesley to the living in 1695, but he and the family did not take up residence until 1697. They remained there with occasional sojourns in the nearby parish of Wroot, later also held by Wesley, until his death in 1735. Here were born the remaining Wesley children, Mehetabel, Anne,

John, Martha, Charles and Kezia, all of whom survived, as well as four to six (such is the uncertainty of the details about a couple of these short-lived babies) who did not."

Even given the Wesleys' love for the written word (and subsequent Methodists' attempts to preserve every scrap they produced),"* the texture of family life during the 39-year Epworth period is not fully recoverable. Nevertheless, certain patterns and certain particular incidents stand out. If they have been staples of Wesleyan legend in the past, they deserve continued attention when viewed from Susanna's perspective; and, in fact, most of these are well represented in her writing, some even finding their original expression there.

The details of daily life occasionally gain expression in Susanna's writing: managing a household, facing illness and other such "afflictions," and raising and educating a large family. The perennial family debts, due in part to Samuel's mismanagement and inattention, weigh heavily on her and sometimes find expression in her letters. It was a major concern, for instance, in the long letter to her brother Samuel

Annesley Jr., a merchant in India, from whom the family expected some financial aid. In the process of outlining their needs (and defending Samuel Wesley's ability to manage money wisely), she alludes to the time in 1705 when her husband was detained in debtor's prison in Lincoln. She writes of the "testimony" she had given at the time to the Archbishop of York, whose aid she sought. In answer to his question about whether the family had "ever really wanted bread," she had replied:

My lord .

. I will freely own to your grace, that strictly speaking, I never did want bread. But then I have had so much care to get it before 'twas eat, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me. And I think to have bread on such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all.'*

While Archbishop Sharp had been touched and responded with"a handsome presnt," her brother was unmoved by the implication that he should follow suit and barely mentioned the Wesleys in his will.*> As other of her letters (and those of her husband) bear witness, their finances were often in this straitened mode.*°

As the one who ran the household, Susanna felt responsibility for their plight, and thus the topic occasionally intrudes even into her devotional life. Her journal recalls, for example, her bargain with God to worship more sincerely in return for an easing of financial pressures:

Susanna Wesley You did sometime since make this vow, that if God would in very deed give you food to eat and raiment to put on without exposing you to the temptation of anxious care or reducing you to the necessity of borrowing for the necessaries of life, that then the Lord should be your God. *'

Next to money problems, ill health seems to have challenged her most on a continuing basis—not surprising given the energy drain of her reproductive life and the "primitive physic" available from eighteenth-century medicine. Already noted above from their time at South Ormsby were the "three or four touches of rheumatism" that afflicted her even as a young woman."® In her correspondence, there are at least a dozen mentions of her bouts of illness, though usually without any specific description. In an early letter to her son Samuel, she is "so ill." In another she explains why she and her husband were sleeping in separate rooms the night of the rectory fire: "I having been very ill, we were obliged to lie asunder." In early 1722 she writes her brother, perhaps exaggerating for sympathetic effect, "I am rarely in health." In the autumn of 1724, she escapes the small pox that the rest of the family contracted but is "very ill, confined to my chamber" the following February. In summer 1727 she reports "very ill health," the following year is laid low by fever and sickness, and the summer after that is "ill for want of tea" (and happy therefore to have a present of tea—and chocolate). Letters from the decade of the 1730s (her

60s) almost always assume ill health, only mentioning situations in which she feels

~ somewhat better. Occasionally, as in a letter to her son Charles (well after her husband's death and her departure from Epworth), her difficulties serve as apologies:

"I should write oft'ner had I better health."*? Health was for her, as for most people, a natural concern, heightened in her day no doubt by the relatively primitive state of sanitation, medicine, and birth control. It was also a subject for spiritual reflection, so that its preservation was a blessing to thank God for and its dissolution was an affliction, like poverty, to be improved "to our spiritual advantage."*° The bottom line, both on fortune and on health, is probably accurately expressed in a letter to Samuel Jr. a few months after the rectory fire in 1709. "Truly my health and fortune is much alike," she writes, "neither very good or extremely bad. I have constantly pain enough to mind me of mortality and trouble enough in my circumstances of fortune to exercise my patience."*! well as in her other "catechetical" essays and numerous journal entries, this focus is also implicit in virtually every letter to her children. Heir to the traditional Protestant concern for education as embodied both in her Puritan upbringing and in her adopted Anglicanism,** Susanna also absorbed many of the newer intellectual assumptions of her own age, voraciously reading contemporary "practical divinity," with its penchant for the "reasonableness" of "natural and revealed religion," and keeping current with such intellectual pace-setters as John Locke.

Though her initial educational attempts with her first pupil Samuel Jr., must have taken place in South Ormsby—apparently something of a slow start**—the process began in earnest in the Epworth rectory. Here, in what John Newton describes as an atmosphere resembling "a small private boarding school,'*° she wasted no time

Introduction

putting her children into "a regular method of living" from birth and then taking them aside on their fifth birthday to teach them the alphabet and start them off on the first chapter of Genesis. The personal attention continued in necessarily methodical fashion: each pupil had her or his special day of the week for a one-on-one tutorial with the headmistress.*® As the letters to her grown sons and the essays prepared particularly with her daughters in mind indicate, she never forsook her pedagogical role, even when her children graduated from her classroom.*"

The results of the Epworth experiment in home schooling were gratifying enough in their own day. Three boys were well prepared for a career track that led to actual boarding schools in the metropolis, to Oxford, and thence to ordination in the Church of England. And the seven sisters received equal preparation, well beyond the normal expectation of their gender and community. Susanna cannot be blamed if that was to their detriment when it came to finding suitable intellectual matches among the young men of the fens, marriage being the primary assumed

"career" of a clergyman's daughters.*® Beyond the immediate pedagogical success, however, many observers have additionally supposed that Susanna's schoolroom and rectory life in general put the initial discipline, the original "method," in John

Wesley's Methodism and ensured that a continuing ideal of the movement would be the joining of "knowledge" with "vital piety."*"

These general elements of family life provide a backdrop for several particular incidents, which leap from Susanna's writing and give vivid testimony not only to "remarkable occurrences" in Wesley family history but also to the extraordinary character of its matriarch. Worth mentioning briefly are the rectory fire of 1709; two signal occasions of Susanna's conscientious insubordination, to husband and governmental authority in one case and to husband and ecclesiastical authority in the other; and the saga of the notorious family poltergeist.

The rectory fire of 1709 is a key reference point in the Methodist story, giving

John Wesley himself and thousands of the faithful thereafter an example of providential intervention. Given up for lost, he was snatched from a fiery upstairs room,

"a brand plucked from the burning," a person chosen for God's future purposes.*°

The event is also central to Susanna's life and experience.

The fire exemplifies the difficulties that came too regularly to the rectory family to be described as merely bad luck. Rather, like their dismissal from South Ormsby and like the financial problems that plagued the family, the fire was probably attributable to the rector's running afoul of disgruntled parishioners. Not that he should be held responsible for the extremes of rough justice that local men sought to impose on the aloof, scholarly, stubborn outsider. Already, the attempts of local retribution had included threats of harm during the parliamentary election of 1705 and, indirectly, the death of a nameless newborn son; a trip to debtors' jail in Lincoln; and the maiming of some of his animals.*' From this perspective, the flames that engulfed the rectory on the frosty night of February 9, 1709, were only the latest and most vicious assault on an unpopular parson.

The family, including the nearly lost young "Jacky," survived the fire unscathed, but otherwise the losses were complete and devastating. House, furniture, clothing, money (just received for some crops), a "good quantity" of some additional crops, all their pewter and brass, all but "25 ounces of plate,' some hemp and corn, and a

Susanna Wesley few sticks of lumber were gone, the makings of continuing financial disaster. Perhaps even more distressing was the loss of Samuel's books and manuscripts, including one ready for the press (worth £50 to the family fortune), and the destruction of the letters and papers willed to Susanna by her late father. A further casualty was

Susanna's own manuscripts; everything we have of hers apart from a few letters preserved by their recipients thus dates after the fire.

Without minimizing the ruinous effects of the fire, Susanna Wesley nevertheless came away from it focused and reinvigorated for the rest of her life. She was on the verge of menopause, her last child, Kezia, being born either in 1709 or 1710. This impending change of life thus coincided with the fire and produced a renewed devotional life, the result of which may be seen in the journals I have collected in part two of this volume. The transition to a motherhood that no longer involved childbearing may have reinforced the conviction born out of her contemplation, and in practical response to the farming out of her children after the fire, that a revitalized sense of educational purpose was called for. In October 1709 she wrote

Samuel Jr., still a pupil in Westminster:

There is nothing I now desire to live for, but to do some small service to my children, that, as I have brought 'em into the world, so that it might please God to make me

(though unworthy) an instrument of doing good to their souls. I had been several years collecting from my little reading, but chiefly from my own experience, some things which I hoped would ha' been useful to you all.

.** Thus began the arduous project of sustained writing that makes up the bulk of part

III of this volume: an exposition of the Creed, a partial exposition of the Decalogue, and a dialogue on natural and revealed religion. Here again Susanna "improved" the affliction, in this important instance gaining a second wind and reviving her sense of vocation for the remainder of her life.

We have already noted Susanna's independence of character when, as a well-read, strong-willed preadolescent, she forsook her father's Nonconformity. Now we may follow the same trait as it was played out on two occasions, a decade apart, in her married life. The first instance took place when Susanna refused to add her "Amen" to Samuel's prayer for the king one evening in late 1701 or early 1702. Though both were High Church and Tory, Samuel was favorably disposed toward William and Mary, who had been invited to rule by Parliament in 1688, while Susanna regarded them as usurpers. She believed James II continued to be king by divine right. It is somewhat unclear why she waited so long to register her protest—Mary, with Stuart blood in her veins, had died in 1694, leaving William to reign on his own in the eight intervening years. Perhaps it was the death of the exiled James II in 1701 that brought the whole issue to mind.*° In any case, the significant omission at family prayers was noted by the rector, who confronted her and, when she refused to recant, took a solemn oath not to touch her until she begged forgiveness. She remained obstinate, and they broke off marital relations for nearly half a year. John Wesley's version of the story included his father's memorable line, "You and I must part: for if we have two kings, we must have two beds."

** Susanna's version, much more complete and intriguing, may

Introduction

be read in her first four extant letters, in part I of this volume. She wrote for counsel to natural allies: a local noblewoman who had been a maid of honor in the Stuart court and one of the most prominent Nonjurors, that sect of divine-right Anglicans who conscientiously refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary.*" The issue for them in the wider political arena and for Susanna in her marriage was liberty erty of conscience. Ironically, a signal trait that had been instilled in her from the Dissenting side of the English religious spectrum was now employed for the sake of an ultra—

High Church cause. With the support of Lady Yarborough and the Rev. George Hickes (he had written her, "stick to God and your conscience which are your best friends"),*° Susanna stood her ground. Only after some time in London and a fire in the rectory '(not as destructive as the later one, though bad enough) had brought

Samuel to his senses were the two finally reconciled. The fruit of their reconciliation arrived June 17, 1703, a baby boy, christened John.

The saga of Susanna standing up against Samuel's (and conventional authority's) sway was to recur a few years after the 1709 rectory fire. In the winter of 1711—

1712, the offended authority was not so much political as ecclesiastical convention.

Samuel, in London as a delegate to the Church of England's convocation, got word from his temporary curate that parishioners were absenting themselves from morning prayer in favor of an irregular Sunday evening service conducted by Mrs. Wesley in the rectory kitchen. Wesley wrote back rebuking his wife, and she replied with a strong letter that answered him point by point, claiming her right to exercise a kind of ministry in his absence. To his objection about a woman presiding at public worship, she replied:

As I am a woman, so I am also mistress of a large family. And though the superior charge of the souls contained in it lies upon you, as head of the family, and as their minister, yet in your absence I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under my care as a talent committed to me under a trust by the great Lord of all the families of heaven and earth.*"

She further explained that she had been inspired by an account of Danish missionaries in India "to do somewhat more than I do," beginning with her own children—thus the genesis of her scheme of individual meetings with each of them once a week. The inspiration also increased her zeal in the conduct of Sunday evening family prayers, and when the circle of attenders widened and servants' families and then the general public sought to attend, she felt she could not turn them away.

The limit, in fact, got to be the capacity of the rectory ground floor, something on the order of 200. The rector was still not convinced and wrote her again, asking her to stop. In due course she replied with a further account of the good her "society" was doing among the people and concluded with one of her more stunning rhetorical flourishes:

If you do after all think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me any more that you desire me to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send me your positive command in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity of doing good to souls, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.**

Susanna Wesley The rector relented; Susanna's conscience had once more withstood husbandly and churchly attempts at control, though this time her actions more closely paralleled her ancestral tradition of Nonconformity. Not believing she had contravened any law, she nevertheless had created a competing institution (an irregular "coventicle" according to her accusers) when the church could not provide for the needs of the parish as she perceived them. Years later, John Wesley, who had been present at the Sunday evening meetings as a boy of nine, read over the correspondence after his mother's death, and concluded, "I cannot but farther observe that even she (as well as her father and grandfather, her husband, and her three sons) had been, in her measure and degree, a preacher of righteousness."

*"By then, Wesley himself had replicated the same model in his own Methodist societies and was here implicitly acknowledging another debt to his mother.

Any description of the Epworth years is incomplete without a mention of Old Jeffrey, the poltergeist that plagued the rectory during December 1716 and January

1717 and has bedeviled historians ever since. A variety of noises and apparitions immediately attracted the household's attention, first the servants and the children, then Samuel and Susanna. Letters to Samuel Jr., by then teaching at Westminster

School, quickly aroused his curiosity and that of his brother John, also in London, a pupil at Charterhouse School. The correspondence from Epworth and the informal depositions that John took in 1720 constitute what one writer on psychic phenomena called the "most fully documented case in the history of the subject."°° This evidence fascinated others, as well; at the end of the century, it surfaced in the hands of the chemist and Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley, who published it to demonstrate John Wesley's captivity to that bane of eighteenth-century rationalism,

"enthusiasm." >!

John Wesley indeed was predisposed to believe in the existence of an invisible supernatural world and thus was ready to accept his family's evidence at face value, another good argument against atheism, Deism, and materialism. Each member of the family, except daughter Hetty, reported his or her experiences in straightforward fashion, as did a hired man and a neighboring clergyman. There seems to have been no apparent hoax. Indeed, in years of wrestling with it, no obvious and satisfying explanation has emerged in bemused Methodist historiography, either.

More to the point of our discussion is what the poltergeist meant to the family, particularly Susanna, and what that says about the worldview of the Epworth rectory.

Because one of the poltergeist's favorite disturbances was to knock during the rector's evening prayer for the king (by then George I), the family concluded that the ghostly being had Jacobite leanings. John went so far as to connect the hauntings to his father's rash oath on the occasion of Susanna's refusal to say amen to his prayers for King William 15 years earlier. He wrote, "I fear his vow was not forgotten before God."°* The eldest daughter, Emily, suggested that the commotions might have some link to an alleged outbreak of witchcraft in a nearby parish, which had moved

Samuel to preach "warmly against consulting those that are called cunning men, which our people are given to." As this occurred just before the onset of Old Jeffrey, she concluded that the supernatural visitant was acting to spite the rector, though it might also suggest another subset of flesh-and-blood parishioners with a motive to disrupt the pretentious inhabitants of the parsonage.°?

Introduction

Susanna herself was initially skeptical at the reports of the servants and children.

On first hearing noises, she suspected rodents and called in someone to blow a horn to drive them away. But the tactic did not work, and matters deteriorated. Noises

(groans and all matter of knockings, stampings, and clatterings) and appearances

(Susanna thought she saw a badger-like creature scurrying across the floor) became too outrageous to deny. At length she decided the visitation portended the death of a close relative, either the rector or someone at a distance, such as Samuel Jr., en route to London, or her brother in India. Finally, at about the time the ghost gave up the rectory, she expressed exasperation at her son Samuel's continuing curiosity about "our unwelcome guest." She was "tired with hearing or speaking of it" and invited the young man to come home to Epworth and experience it for himself.°*

The episode paints in bold relief Susanna's, her family's, and perhaps the age's continuing predisposition toward supernaturalism against the background. of reasonableness and science. Priestley and other eighteenth-century commentators might accuse her of enthusiasm and credulity. We might more charitably contend that the irrational and the emotional imply another, not necessarily an inferior, worldview, an alternative discourse in which a woman could express and discover herself quite well—especially when held in tension with rational and experiential considerations.

Pascal himself, another anomaly of the era, whom Susanna read and commented on in her journal, expresses an appropriate agnosticism for those rationalists who would too quickly foreclose on the "superstitious" side of é -eighteenth-century thought: "the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know,"®? /

The death of Samuel Wesley Sr. in 1735 signaled the beginning of a new lifephase for Susanna. In addition to the loss of her husband of some 46 years, it also meant her removal from the Epworth rectory (a place that for all the disruptions had been home for nearly as long). Now she would no longer be mistress of a household but would sojourn for a seven-year period as a guest, albeit a welcome one, with various of her children. She first stayed with Emily, now a schoolmistress in nearby Gainsborough. Then she moved southwest to live with Samuel Jr., a headmaster in Tiverton, Devon, leaving him two years before his unexpected death in 1739 to be with her daughter Martha (called Patty) and her clergyman husband,

Westley Hall, in three locations (Wooton, Wiltshire, near Malborough; Fisherton near Salisbury; and London). From that last brief arrangement it was an easy step to finally take up residence with her son John at his London headquarters, the Foundery, within hailing distance of her birthplace.

Communication with friends loomed larger in her final years, as several of her letters attest.°® Staying with her children in various corners of the land allowed her to make new friends, as far as we can tell from letters, all female. One such was

Alice Peard, a woman she met while staying with Samuel in Tiverton and wrote to at least once after joining Martha and Westley Hall in Wiltshire. Another was the countess of Huntingdon, an influential player in the evangelical revival, who had sent her a bottle of madeira and, apparently, a generous gift of financial support at the Foundery.°' If some of her new acquaintances were not up to that standard of affability and/or generosity,°® that did not cause Susanna to pull back from social contacts in her advanced years.

Although friends could help her deal with the loss of husband and home and all

Susanna Wesley the difficulties that came with widowhood and aging, they were no substitute for family. Thus, she began to rely on her children, not just for room, board, and financial support but also for their visits and, when that was not possible, their correspondence. For instance, the string of letters to Charles in 1738 and 1739 contain frequent references to the help, both temporal and spiritual, that he and John were providing her. She expresses her strong desire to be visited by Charles so they can talk over some of her problems. She would even like more time with John, whom she infrequently saw. She wrote of him:

My dear Son Wesley hath just been with me and much revived my spirits. Indeed I've often found that he never speaks in my hearing without my receiving some spiritual benefit; but his visits are seldom and short, for which I never blame him, because I know he is well employed, and, blessed be God, hath great success in his ministry.°"

To this example of family support may be added one other episode, reported in a conversation with John. She spoke to him of the strong sense of forgiveness she felt while receiving the cup from her son-in-law Hall at Communion one Sunday in August 1739. Though John and Charles both made a bit too much of the incident,

"assurance of pardon" being an expected mark of Methodist experience, and though she would have been scandalized had she known of Hall's unfaithfulness to her daughter, which came out only later,°° Susanna was genuinely touched. She, who had spent most of her life serving others, could at this point in her life also grate- ' fully receive service from those close to her.

This is not to say that she had become passive and had relinquished her maternal, intellectual, and theological authority. She still had an active mind and continued to advise and confront when occasion demanded. While fiercely proud of her sons' evangelical work, she was not above puncturing some of their early enthusiastic pretensions, as when she accused Charles of falling into "an odd way of thinking" in saying he had "no spiritual life nor any justifying faith" before his conversion earlier that year.°' Her misgivings were not to be taken as disavowals of the Methodist movement, as some of John's and Charles's enemies tried to make it seem, but rather attempts to further the important work she saw them doing.°'

Baus the best example of her SM Ms Hor involves her role in pnsaeer PRPS the employment of unordained but 'spiritually gifted people in_preachin ng. ane

Thomas Maxfield began the practice without permission during one of Wesley's frequent absences. Before returning to take care of the situation, Wesley spoke to his mother, who replied, "My son, I charge you before God, beware what you do; for Thomas Maxfield is as much called to preach the Gospel as ever you were!" ®* Taken aback by her blunt statement and perhaps remembering her own "irregular" preaching in the Epworth rectory years before, he saw her wisdom and adopted the new practice, which developed into a trademark of Methodism and one reason for its early success.

The culmination, in many ways, of her life's work was the final document of this collection, her anonymous pamphlet of 1741 that defends her son John in his quarrel with George Whitefield. Some Remarks on a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Whitefield to the Reverend Mr. Wesley, in a Letter from a Gentlewoman to Her Friend brought together in a public

Susanna Wesley's England. Susanna Wesley began and ended her life in London but spent most of it in the remote Lincolnshire parish of Epworth (and its yoked neighbor, Wroot).

After leaving London and before moving to Epworth, she lived in South Ormsby, her husband Samuel's first parish, also in Lincolnshire. Following her husband's death, she sojourned briefly with various of her children—in nearby Gainsborough, Tiverton (in the southwest), Wooton, and Salisbury (in south-central England)—before she finally returned to London.

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—— Se ——S Susanna Wesley as a young woman. Late-nineteenth-century engraving, possibly from an authentic early portrait. A copy of the engraving hangs in the Old Rectory in Epworth.

Susanna Wesley at age 68.

John Williams, a pupil of Samuel Richardson, painted Susanna's portrait in 1738, several years before her death. This engraving was made from the portrait a year or two after she died.

The portrait has survived and is currently owned by Wesley College, Bristol, but it was inaccurately restored with a younger woman's face in 1891. The engraving is therefore probably her most authentic likeness.

EASLEY bps gares AHA HIN LH By Se ay 9,

Susanna Wesley as an older woman. W. H. Gibbs engraving, following the original John Williams oil painting of 1738.

Taken from the frontispiece of John Kirk, The Mother of the Wesleys, 6th edition (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1876).

Susanna Wesley's birthplace, Spital Yard, off Bishopsgate, London.

Her father, the dissenting minister Samuel Annesley, and his family lived here at some point following his ejection from the living of St: Giles, Cripplegate; im: 1662.

Susanna probably also stayed here briefly as the young wife of Samuel Wesley during his brief chaplaincy on a man-of-war. During that period, her first son,

Samuel Wesley Jr., was born in 1690. The building has survived— though just barely—the 1990s commercial development around Liverpool Street Station.

St. Leonard's Church, South Ormsby, Lincolnshire, Samuel Wesley Sr's first ecclesiastical preferment. During the family's time in this rural parish

(1691-1697), Susanna Wesley bore six children, three of whom died in infancy.

The Epworth rectory, rebuilt after the devastating fire of 1709. The rectory was the primary Wesley family residence from late 1697 until Samuel Wesley's death in 1735. Restored as a place of pilgrimage by the World Methodist Council in the 1950s, it was the site of Susanna's home school and her Sunday evening public prayer services; it was also the haunt of "Old Jeffrey," the erstwhile family poltergeist.

Blundell's School, Tiverton, Devon, where Samuel Wesley Jr. served as headmaster from 1732 until his death in November 1739. The widowed Susanna Wesley lived here with her eldest son and his family from September 1736 to July 1737, probably in apartments on the left side of the building. Blundell's outgrew the facility in the middle of the nineteenth century and still flourishes in larger premises a mile or two away. The original building has since been renovated as a retirement home.

St. Andrew's Church, Wooten Rivers, Wiltshire. Susanna lived in the rectory of this agricultural parish with her daughter Martha and son-inlaw, the Reverend Westley Hall, in 1737-1738, before moving with them to the Salisbury suburb of Fisherton in 1738 and finally to London in 1739. nif i He a iy a) , (\\ \ === = We The Foundery, formerly a royal foundry for cannon, was renovated and used by John

Wesley as his London headquarters from 1740 to 1778. In addition to a preaching house, a schoolroom, and his own apartments, the facility afforded space for traveling preachers and their families and for his mother, Susanna Wesley. Here, probably in the gabled section on the right, she lived the final two years of her life. Here she died on 30 July 1742.

called Methodisés.

Tn Sure and certain hepe fe rise. and claim her mansion in the gkies, @"bristian here ber ¢tesa laid dows the Cross exchan@iag for agzawn. ai Susanna Wesley's grave, Bunhill Fields, London. After Susanna's death in 1742, John Wesley buried his mother in this dissenters' cemetery across City Road from the eventual site of his chapel (built in 1774). The stone, recently cleaned and restored, actually dates from 1828, when Methodist officials replaced the original, less-descriptive one put there by her son. Her neighbors in Bunhill Fields include John Bunyan, Isaac Watts, and William Blake.

Introduction

way several important strands of her life. First, it called on her adversarial personality, nurtured in Puritanism, further cultivated in her Nonjuring phase, and continually reinforced in the struggles of her personal and devotional life. Second, it allowed her to demonstrate her intellectual acuity, to draw on her wide reading, and to employ the ready style she had developed in all her years as a closeted writer. Finally, public and private concerns coincided when she was able to identify her sons' cause with God's intention for the nation and defend them both. Though it might have been more gratifying to have her name on the pamphlet's title page, her anonymity seems appropriate: she had the quiet satisfaction of seeing her work in print and yet could assure herself that she was not transcending the boundaries of female modesty. And perhaps there was, in addition, the canny realization that the work would be more effective if readers did not perceive it as a mother defending her son.

Mother and son were together at the end, Friday, 30 July 1742, as were most of her surviving daughters. Before she lost her speech, she had addressed them, "Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God," and they afterward obliged her. "An innumerable company of people" gathered for her funeral, John preached the sermon, and she was buried (appropriately, given both her origins and her own dissenting style, even as an Anglican) in the Dissenters' burial ground in Bunhill Fields just across from the future site of Wesley's City Road Chapel. Commented Wesley in his Journal, "It was one of the most solemn assemblies I ever saw, or expect to see on this side eternity."

°* (Re)assessments The basic hagiographical, not to say romantic, view of Susanna Wesley is well exemplified in Adam Clarke's early-nineteenth-century assessment. Recounting her roles as wife, mistress of a large family, Christian, mother, and friend and the impact she had, especially on John Wesley, he exclaims, "If it were not unusual to apply such an epithet to a woman, I would not hesitate to say she was an able divine!" He confesses not having seen her like among all the pious females he has known, heard of, or read about, and he concludes by inserting her name into the famous description of a good woman in the book of Proverbs: "Many daughters have done virtuously: but SUSANNA WESLEY has excelled them all."

"Able divine" and "good woman" are not bad places to start in any overview of Susanna Wesley. Without capitulating to the hagiographic and romantic readings of the past, we may nevertheless contend that she deserves a place both in theological discussion and in the wider consideration of women's history. Granted, Clarke's first phrase sounds a bit quaint (and a bit obvious, now that women have long since filled ministerial roles); and early Methodists and late-twentieth-century feminists might disagree on the meaning of the second catchall expression, the proverbial good woman. But if "able divine" may be employed to suggest a particular vocational subculture (a language, a set of theological and devotional assumptions, a worldview) and "good women" can hint at the more generic sense of what it has meant for women to excel, these two descriptions may not be far from the mark. If

Susanna Wesley so, Susanna Wesley may prove to be a fit subject for feminists and for those who study women, their history, and their literature, as well as for Christians and for those who study that tradition and its interaction with society and culture. Our age may not regard her as St. Susanna, mother of St. John, any longer, but it might justly discover her to be a competent, practical theologian-educator and a complex and extraordinary woman in her own historical context.

It will not be difficult to convince religionists to take a fresh look at Susanna, particularly those who stand in and/or study any of the same traditions that she inhabited: the Puritan, the Anglican, and the Methodist. For them, Susanna's life and work provide clues to the links between and among these three important strands of English Protestantism. For instance, those searching for the origins of Methodist religious experience and emotionalism might usefully find in Susanna a connection to what Gordon Rupp has called a "devotion of rapture" among English

Puritans.°° Students of John Wesley's sometimes troublesome doctrine of Christian perfection, and for that matter Anglicans interested in the development of the "holy living" strand of their tradition, might notice Susanna's own wrestlings with that subject as guided by the blind Welsh theologian Richard Lucas.°' In a waning ecumenical age, when communities are urged to celebrate their particularities, constructive attention might be paid to the tension between partisan identity and "catholic spirit" as it plays out in Susanna Wesley's life. How could she read so widely

(Puritans, continental Catholics, all stripes of Anglicans) but at times focus so narrowly (e.g., in her Nonjuring phase) and yet over the course of her life find some sort of continuity in three movements in early modern English religion?

An obvious special focus of current religious studies of Susanna Wesley is her femaleness. How did gender affect her participation in religious life? How did the religious traditions that she was part of condition, limit, and possibly liberate her?

In two earlier studies I have attempted to discover some of the possibilities. I have argued, for instance, that certain elements of her spirituality (conscience, reason, and religious experience) did in fact act as solvents "against the patriarchal biases then prevailing."°®* I have further explored her intellectual life—her reading and the writing amply displayed in this volume—as a factor in the resistance she mustered against her father, her husband, her sons, and her pamphlet opponent George

Whitefield, in effect, against the patriarchal authority of the Establishment.®' Among other discoveries or confirmations that emerged in her writing, "a conscience void of offense," a God-given reason that is closely related to self-reverence and the "dignity of your nature," and the experience of "loving and being beloved by [God]," all might offer a woman the eighteenth-century equivalent of empowerment.'° The premium put on education and literacy by Protestantism, particularly in its Enlightenment phase beginning in the late seventeenth century, could be applied with revolutionary effect to women as well as to men. This is not news to students of Western religion, though surprisingly few have paid attention to the period between the Civil War sects and the rise of Methodism.'' A thorough reconsideration of Susanna

Wesley, based on the documents assembled here, should immensely enrich our understanding of that process.'*

Though some literary historians have neglected women who wrote in a spiritual vein,'* others have recognized them, deferring to the number of women writers if

Introduction

not to their theological assumptions. As Patricia Crawford has noted, "Religious writing of various kinds was the most important area of publication for seventeenthcentury women." And the same would be true, if to a somewhat lesser extent, in the eighteenth century.'* Women like Susanna who wrote out of a religiously constructed worldview are beginning to gain the recognition of scholars in this field.

And the day is not far off when Susanna herself will garner similar notice: she— along with her sometime black sheep daughter Hetty, that is, Mehetable Wright,'°-— has recently been certified as a "woman writer" in the spate of dictionaries and "companions" that are beginning to recover names and sources.'®

In fact, feminist literary historians have already made helpful approaches. Opening up the literary canon to religious women writers has involved paying positive attention to previously ignored "women's" genres such as the diary, autobiographical writing, the meditation, and the conversion narrative.'' Each of the three genres that we have identified in her writing and used as organizing principles in this collection—letters,'* diaries,'? and published essays*°—have been illuminated in recent work.

Clearly, whether we read Susanna Wesley as an early "able [female] divine" or simply as a "good woman" who wrote and lived in a religious idiom, like many another in her day, we can no longer regard her only as John Wesley's mother. She most assuredly is that, and that relationship brought her to public view and led to the preservation of the documents we can now proceed to explore. As we delve into these texts, though, her identity may begin to emerge in a richer form than ever before. Who is Susanna Wesley? Mediated by her own writings, a woman of her own time and place, she emerges in these pages as a complex and compelling personality who has much to teach. have organized Susanna Wesley's work into three parts, corresponding to three iI discernible genres that she employed. Part I consists of her letters, which are the best-dated and most complete record of her connection to her family and the world around her. Part II offers her devotional diaries. They are rarely dated, probably from a relatively narrow slice of years early in the century, but they open up her spirituality and, more clearly than the other writings, reveal her deepest self in process.

Finally, part III presents her longer theological and educational writings—not that these themes are absent from letter and journal, but they are more sustained here, written with self-consciousness and intended for either real or informal publication.

This is Susanna boldly trying her hand at a "male" task, albeit for the best of female motives, the education of her children and the defense of her son.

In general I have sought to present the most accurate transcription of Susanna Wesley's own writing consistent with easy comprehension by the modern reader. I wish to avoid her Victorian editors' attempt to expunge, correct, dress up, and otherwise tamper with her work. At the same time, I have restrained the urge to reproduce a text so exactly that every archaism and quirk of handwriting becomes a stumbling block to the interested general reader.

In pursuit of this goal the following guidelines have been used.

Spelling has been corrected and usually modernized, using the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as standard. For instance, chuse becomes choose, but centre and Saviour

Susanna Wesley remain as they are—Susanna should still be allowed to write with a British accent.

Commonly occurring colloquial or shorthand spellings such as bin and som and coud are regularized to been and some and could.

Contractions and abbreviations are expanded unless they indicate speech patterns that would otherwise be lost. Thus 'tis and I've and 'em are maintained, but wn is expanded to when and yt becomes that.

Punctuation has been left alone unless alterations are required for sense or to avoid the distraction of excessive use, for example, of commas. Many of her sentences, particularly in letters and journal, tend to run on without adequate punctuation, in which case I have revised them according to modern convention and my own best judgment. Her sometimes excessive use of exclamation points is occasionally left as is to indicate her emotional state; when I have limited them a bit to preserve the flow of her sentences, I have so noted. Though she does occasionally employ quotation marks, I have frequently introduced them as part of my editorial attempt to track down her use of biblical and other material, and I so indicate in the notes.

I have tried to follow manuscript paragraphing, but given the excessive length of some of her paragraphs, I have from time to time introduced my own, and I have so indicated.

Notes, in addition to citing sources of quotations and allusions when available, also provide definitions of technical theological terms and archaic usage and give some more wide-ranging explanations if they have not already been covered in introductory material. Definitions have been taken, usually uncited, from the Oxford

English Dictionary.

Thankfully, other textual apparatus has not often been necessary, but the following should be kept in mind:

[Brackets] are used for editorial insertions where the text is deficient but a fairly reliable guess may be made. Also, where noted in one or two instances, brackets are employed to indicate manuscript variations.

[?] precedes a probable reading of an illegible word.

Ellipses (. .

.) indicate omissions in a manuscript, for example, when the only manuscript of a letter is the excerpted copy in John Wesley's letter book.

A blank ( ), occasionally employed by Susanna herself, indicates words, usually names, that she intentionally omitted on her page.

Italics in text indicate Susanna's own underlining, unless otherwise noted. (Note, however, that such emphasis could have been added by any subsequent reader of the manuscript.)

Notes 1. Typical of the hagiographic tradition is John Kirk, The Mother of the Wesleys: A Biography,

6th ed.(London: Jarrold, 1876), first published in 1864. That S. W. (I will employ her initials for brevity's sake in the notes) was promoted as a saintly model is clear from the bookplate inside my second-hand copy of Kirk. In 1898 it had been awarded to a young woman, Myrtle

Hodge, for winning the Circuit Prize (Middle Division), Examination in History of Meth-

Introduction ?1 odism, by the Cornish Wesleyan Methodist Church Council. Elsie G. Harrison, Son to Susanna:

The Private Life of John Wesley (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937), argues John's continuing emotional links to his mother. Writing of his most promising relationship with a woman,

Harrison observes, "It was clear that neither Grace Murray nor anyone else ever really had a fair chance with John Wesley. S. W. had seen to all that under the old thatched roof of Epworth Rectory .

. .(p. 323.) 2. All told there are at least a half dozen full-length biographies and a host of articles or parts of larger works that treat S. W's life. John Wesley himself began the hagiographical tradition during the eighteenth century in the pages of his Journal and his Arminian Magazine,

(AM) in which anecdotes, references, and some of her writings take their place with notices of other exemplary Christians. The beatification continued in 1823 with the English publication of Adam Clarke's Memoirs of the Wesley Family; Collected Principally from Original Documents (New

York: N. Bangs and T. Mason for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1824). As the subtitle suggests, this volume is an anthology, as well as a biographical-hagiographical study. S. W. is the focus of about a fifth of the book, which deals with the entire Wesley family except for John and Charles. See the Bibliography for a more complete listing of relevant works. And see also John Newton, the author of the best biography, Susanna Wesley and the Puritan Tradition in Methodism (London: Epworth, 1968), for his analysis of his predecessors in that endeavor,

"Susanna Wesley (1669-1742): A Bibliographical Survey," Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society

[subsequently, PWHS]37 (1969-1970): 37-40. For an introduction to the subsequent mishandling of much of S. Ws writing, see Elizabeth Hart, "Susanna and Her Editors" PWHS 48.6

(1992): 202-209; and 49.1 (1993): 1-10.

3. Now that we have a Foucauldian reading of John Wesley, Henry Abelove's Evangelist of Desire (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1990), and given the plethora of feminist literary historical work, there are doubtless many critical approaches that might be applied to S. W's texts. I have noted in an as yet unpublished paper that, for some, a devotional discipline might provide the private space Virginia Woolf advocated for a woman to write and think: "The Prayer Closet as 'A Room of One's Own': Two Anglican Women Devotional

Writers at the turn of the Eighteenth Century"; an earlier version was presented under a slightly different title at the American Society of Church History meetings, Washington, D.C.,

December 1992. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Triad Grafton, 1977).

4. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds., The Works of John Wesley: Vol. 19.

Journals and Diaries, II (1738-42) (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), p. 283. For a discussion of this and other details of the Annesley family, see the authoritative study by Betty Young, "Sources for the Annesley Family," PWHS 45.2 (1985): 47-57.

5. Sometimes written 1668/69 to indicate that the Old Style calendar, still in official use until 1752, did not begin the new year until March 25.

6. John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, 2 vols. (London: J. Nichols, Son, and Bentley, 1818), 1:166.

7. Timothy Rogers, The Character of a Good Woman.

. Occasiond by the Decease of Mrs. Elizabeth Dunton.

. .(London: John Harris, 1697). Filtered through the lens of a Nonconformist minister, the sermon shows numerous parallels between Elizabeth and her younger sister Susanna.

Like Susanna, she kept a diary, and in it she "made a great many Reflections, both on the State of her own Soul, and on other Things, that as far as could be judged by the Bulk, would have made a very considerable Folio" (sig. e5).

8. Young, "Sources for the Annesley Family," pp. 55-56.

9. See John A. Newton, "Samuel Annesley (1620-1696), PWHS 45.2 (1985): 29-45.

10. The house, a plain three-story brick structure with an attic garret just off Bishopsgate, is called "Susannah [sic] Wesley House" and most recently served as a solicitor's office. It is dwarfed by the current spate of office-block developments above and around Liverpool Street

Susanna Wesley Station, but the site is apparently noteworthy enough to have survived destruction and redevelopment. However, it has recently been flanked on the Bishopsgate side by an Americanstyle "Fatboy's Diner." A plaque on the north side commemorates Susanna Annesley's birth.

For a sense of Samuel Annesley's extensive library, see the sale catalogue prepared after his death, in Edward Millington, ed., Bibliotheca Annesleiana:.

. The Library of the Reverend Samuel Annesley, ..

. (London, 1697). An original is in the British Library; Wesley Theological Seminary,

Washington, D.C., owns a microfiche copy.

11. The Character of the Late Dr. Samuel Annesley, by Way of Elegy .

. by One of His Hearers (London:

E. Whitlock, 1697).

12. Newton, "Samuel Annesley," p. 39.

13. See the letter to Samuel Wesley Jr., 11 October 1709.

14. The most authoritative recent account of Samuel Wesley's early years, based on newly discovered materials, is H. A. Beecham, "Samuel Wesley Senior: New Biographical Evidence,"

Renaissance and Modern Studies 7 (1963): 78-109.

15. Ibid., pp. 85-87. See also Newton, Susanna Wesley, pp. 65-66.

16. For instance, discussions with her future husband seem to have persuaded her to pull back from a temporary inclination toward Socinianism (Unitarianism). See Newton, Susanna

Wesley, p. 66.

17. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, abridged ed. (New

York: Harper Colophon, 1979), pp. 217-253.

18. At the time a semirural suburb, Newington Butts is now inner city, a stone's throw from Elephant and Castle underground station. The parish church is long since gone, and the only ecclesiastical edifice is Spurgeon's London Tabernacle, relic of a later time, itself seeming out of place in the tangle of council flats, shopping centers, and speeding traffic.

19. See his long letter of 22 August 1692, in Beecham, "Samuel Wesley," pp. 102-108.

20. Ibid., p. 108.

21. Clarke, Wesley Family, p. 61.

22. For details on the Wesley offspring, see Frank Baker, "Investigating Wesley Family

Traditions," Methodist History 26.3 (1988): 159-162.

23. See especially Clarke, Wesley Family.

24. Letter to Samuel Annesley Jr., 20 January 1721/22, in part I of this volume.

25. See Young, "Sources for the Annesley Family," p. 52.

26. See, among others, her letter regarding the 1709 fire to Joseph Hoole, 24 August 1709.

Even at the end of her life, she was not in good financial shape. See the letter to Charles

Wesley, 19 October 1738. For Samuel Wesley's perspective, see Clarke, Wesley Family, pp. 76-82,

86-96, and 128-133, and Beecham's publication of a recently discovered letter from the South

Ormsby period, in "Samuel Wesley," pp. 102-108. A letter from Emilia to John, 7 April 1725, details the pinch she felt when called home from her boarding school job to keep her mother company (George Stevenson, Memorials of the Wesley Family

. (London: S. W. Partridge; New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), pp. 262-64.

27. See journal entry 119, dated 17 October 1715, in part II of this volume.

28. Beecham, "Samuel Wesley," p. 108.

29. See the following letters:

27 November 1707; 14 February 1708/09; 20 January 1721/22; 10 September 1724; 23 February 1724/25; 26 July 1727; 12 August 1728; 11 August

1729; 21 February 1731/32; 5 August 1737; 6 December 1738.

30. See journal entries 105 and 13, respectively. See also entries 25, 160, and 253 and her letter to her son John, 26 July 1727.

31. Letter to Samuel Wesley Jr., 11 October 1709.

32. See "On Educating My Family," the first essay in part III of this volume.

Introduction

33. See the brief introduction to ibid.

34. The family story told to Adam Clarke by John Wesley was that Samuel Jr. did not speak at all until he was between four and five years old. One day when the family could not find him, S. W. combed the house, frantically calling his name. Suddenly, a small voice was heard speaking a complete sentence from under a table: "Here am I, mother!" Looking down they found "Sammy" and his favorite cat. "From this time," says Wesley, "he spoke regularly, and without any kind of hesitation." Clarke, Wesley Family, pp. 213-214.

35. Susanna Wesley, pp. 109-110.

36. See journal entry 79 and the letter to her husband, 6 February 1712.

37. Note the insistence of Richard Allestree's influential The Whole Duty of Man.

. (Oxford:

George Pawlet, 1684), p. 115, that after children are "past the age of education,' parents are still to observe them "and accordingly to exhort, incourage, or reprove, as they find occasion."

38. S. W's concern for her children's marriages, particularly her daughters', is visible in several letters to John, for example, 12 October 1726 (on Hetty's problematic relationship), 1

January 1733/34 (her reservations on Molly's marriage), and 31 January 1727 (some straight talk on what she regarded as an inappropriate, albeit platonic, relationship of his own). Her dissatisfaction with her daughter Suky's choice is recorded in her letter to her brother Samuel

Annesley Jr., 20 January 1721/22. The same letter indicates that at least one of the sisters tried for a while the only other option, that of governess or teacher. The bad luck of the Wesley daughters in later life is the subject of Frederick E. Maser, The Story of John Wesley's Sisters, or Seven

Sisters in Search of Love (Rutland, Vt.: Academy Books, 1988).

39. The Methodist nickname came later, one of several slung at the devotional group the Wesley brothers led at Oxford, but the way of life, in both its well-ordered and obsessivecompulsive aspects, clearly originated in the Epworth rectory. John Wesley understood the importance of his mother's childrearing and educational methodology and gave wide circulation to her letter describing it. For its continuing influence, see the introduction to "On Educating My Family," in part III of this volume.

40. Family letters started the legend, including S. W.'s own to Samuel Jr., 14 February and 11 October 1709, and one to the Rev. Joseph Hoole, 24 August 1709.

41. See the convenient summary of these sad episodes in Maldwyn Edwards, Family Circle:

A Study of the Epworth Household in Relation to John and Charles Wesley (London: Epworth, 1949), pp.

18-20. The baby was "overlaid" by the nurse to whom it was entrusted the night before the election. Noisy partisans had kept her awake by discharging pistols and making a general disturbance where she and the Wesleys were lodged for the night in Lincoln; when she finally fell into a deep sleep, she unknowingly rolled over on the infant and smothered him. See the account in Samuel Wesley's letter to the archbishop of York in Clarke, Wesley Family, p. 90

42. To Samuel Wesley Jr., 11 October 1709. See also the various journal entries in which she wrestles with this issue, for example, 51, 52, and 56, and the opening lines of her letter to Suky on the Creed, in part III of this volume, as well as the journal entry 2, in part II, which alludes to the "misfortunes that have separated" the family.

43. Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688-1791 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 6, explains that there were "recurring problems of conscience" for some half a century for those who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the new succession. Clearly the abortive attempts to return the Stuarts to power in 1715 and 1745 provoked such soul-searching; but so did the death of a monarch, whether the deposed James II or the actually reigning William,

Anne, and George I.

44. This bit of family oral tradition was recorded by Clarke, Wesley Family, p. 83.

45. See Rupp's helpful chapter on the phenomenon in Religion in England, pp. 5—28.

Susanna Wesley 46. Quoted in Robert Walmsley, "John Wesley's Parents: Quarrel and Reconciliation,"

PWHS 24.3 (1953): 55. Walmsley first discovered and published S. W's letters to Lady Yarborough and Dean Hickes.

47. To Samuel Wesley Sr., 6 February 1711/12.

48. To Samuel Wesley Sr., 25 February 1711/12.

49. Ward and Heitzenrater, Journals and Diaries (30 July 1742), p. 284.

50. Harry Price, Poltergeist over England, quoted in Edwards, Family Circle, p. 95.

51. Joseph Priestley, Original Letters, by the Rev. John Wesley and his friends .

. (Birmingham:

Thomas Pearson, 1791), p. iv.

52. Clarke, Wesley Family, p. 143.

53. Ibid., p. 154. Beliefs and practices of this sort were certainly part of the popular religious mix of the time. James Obelkevich has detailed their existence in nineteenth-century

Lincolnsire (though in another part of the county) in Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825—

1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976): pp. 259-312. He finds belief in ghosts, witches, and wise men—who could in some ways be seen as rivals to the clergy—among village people

(pp. 282-291) and accounts for it in part by the weaknesses of official Christianity, "the remoteness of its high God, the social elevation of its clergy," and so on (p. 301). However,

"wise men rushed in where Anglicans feared to tread .

." (p. 304), dealing with everyday problems concerning weather, crops, animals, health, love, and death in immediate ways. In the Epworth case a century before, members of the Wesley family found themselves, against their natural Enlightened inclinations, pulled into the popular worldview. Their fascination is evident, but so is their discomfort; they were very much in Epworth but not of it, and that distinction may at some level help explain the whole episode.

54. See her letters to Samuel Jr—12 January 1716/17; 25 or 27 January 1716/17; and 27

March 1717—and her "Account to Jack," dated 27 August 1726, which I have included immediately thereafter, in part I. The fullest collection of all the material on Old Jeffrey is in Clarke,

Wesley Family, pp. 136-167.

(5s) See entries 84, 131, 133-135, 138-139, and 207. The quotation is from the modern edition, Pascal's Pensées, introducton by T. S. Eliot (New York: Dutton, 1958), p. 78.

56. Though we should not conclude that she lacked friends in earlier stages of her life just because few nonfamily letters survive from those periods.

57. To Alice Peard, 5 August 1737; to the countess of Huntingdon, 1 July 1741.

58. An objectionable woman seems to have attempted to cozy up to S. W. at the Foundery, driving off other, more compatible companions. See the letter to Charles, 27 December 1739.

59. To Charles Wesley, 27 December 1739.

60. See Ward and Heitzenrater, Journals and Diaries, II, (3 September 1739), pp. 93-94. Hall later turned out to be, in Clarke's words, "a Moravian and Quietist, an Antinomian, a Deist, if not an Atheist, and a Polygamist, which last he defended in his teaching, and illustrated by his practice" (Wesley Family, p. 421). Charles celebrated her newfound "assurance" in a poem composed for her tombstone, making it appear as if she had lived in darkness, evangelically speaking, for the previous 70 years. See Ward and Heitzenrater, Journals and Diaries, II (1 August

1742), pp. 283-284.

61. To Charles Wesley, 6 December 1738.

62. See Clarke, Wesley Family, pp. 275-286, refuting the claim made by Samuel Badcock in 1782 and afterward circulated for purposes of controversy that Mrs. Wesley "lived long enough to deplore the extravagances of her two sons John and Charles.

63. Ibid., p. 236.

64. Ward and Heitzenrater, Journals and Diaries, II, pp. 282-84. The original tombstone was notable for its lack of biographical information and its inclusion of a four-stanza hymn composed by Charles Wesley:

Introduction

Here lies the body of Mrs. Susanna Wesley, the youngest and last surviving daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley.

In sure and steadfast hope to rise And claim her mansion in the skies, A Christian here her flesh laid down, The cross exchanging for a crown.

True daughter of affliction she, Inured to pain and misery, Mourned a long night of grief and fears,

A legal night of seventy years.

The Father then revealed the Son, Him in the broken bread made known.

She knew and felt her sins forgiven, And found the earnest of her heaven.

Meet for the fellowship above, She heard the call, "Arise, my love."

"T come," her dying looks replied, And lamb-like, as her Lord, she died.

Having worn badly, this stone was replaced by a more descriptive one in 1828, maintained by Methodist pilgrims ever since. A larger monument was erected on the grounds of Wesley's

Chapel in 1870. See Stevenson, Memorials, pp. 228-229.

65. Clarke, Wesley Family, pp. 291-292; his emphasis. See Proverbs 31:29.

66. Gordon Rupp, "A Devotion of Rapture in English Puritanism," in R. Buick Knox, ed.,

Reformation, Conformity and Dissent: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Nuttall (London: Epworth, 1977), p.

119. I have enlarged on this in my article "Susanna Wesley's Spirituality: The Freedom of a Christian Women," Methodist History 22.3 (1984): 168.

67. See the host of journal entries that quote Lucas and/or discuss Christian perfection:

193-196, 202-203, 205, 208, 212-214, 219, 226, 228, 231-233, 237-238, 240-243, and 252.

68. Wallace, "Susanna Wesley's Spirituality," p. 160.

69. See Charles Wallace Jr., ""Some Stated Employment of Your Mind': Reading, Writing, and Religion in the Life of Susanna Wesley," Church History 58 (1989): pp. 354-366.

70. See her journal entries 181 (following Bishop Beveridge's sermon on conscience), 51, and 191. Patricia Crawford has recently sketched the wider landscape, even including S. W.

(and her conscientious refusal to say "amen" to the prayer for King William) as one of the details in the picture: "Public Duty, Conscience, and Women in Early Modern England," in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf, eds., Public Duty and Private Conscience in SeventeenthCentury England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): pp. 57-76. Her conclusion is that conscience "justified some women's wifely disobedience and their participation in English social and political life" (p.76).

71. Checking some of the important anthologies on women and Christianity, I find significant gaps that further study of S. W. could help fill. There is no chapter on women of her generation or on early female Methodists in Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds.,

Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1972). Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson's anthology, Women and Religion: A Feminist

Sourcebook of Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), moves from John Milton to Ann Lee to Schleiermacher with not a look at anything Anglican or Methodist. Dale Johnson's anthology, Women in English Religion, 1700-1925 (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1983)

Susanna Wesley is better, including in its narrower focus both Anglican and Methodist sources and referring to S. W. as part of an introduction to the evangelical revival; but it includes nothing of her writing. Richard L. Greaves, ed., Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood, 1985), skips directly from a chapter on sectarian women in lateseventeenth-century England to chapters on Puritanism and Methodism, respectively—in America. Barbara J. MacHaffie, Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress,

1986), moves directly from the Reformation to religion in the American colonies, giving only the briefest of details about any Englishwomen in the interim. The recent collection, Lynda

L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elisabeth W. Sommer, eds., That Gentle Strength: Historical

Perspectives on Women in Christianity (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press,

1990): totally neglects English religion prior to the Victorian era. And W J. Sheils and Diana

Wood, eds., Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), provide no direct treatment of the Church of England between the Reformation and the Victorian era. As one might expect,

Methodist denominational history has done better. Witness, for example, and just to mention book-length treatment, Earl Kent Brown, The Women of Mr. Wesley's Methodism (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1983); Paul W. Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early

Methodism (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1991); and of course, John Newton's Susanna Wesley and Rebecca Lamar Harmon's Susanna: Mother of the Wesleys (Nashville and New York: Abingdon,

1986).

72. The stage has recently been well set by Patricia Crawford's splendid monograph, Women and Religion in England, 1500-1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Though she, too, gives only scant coverage to turn-of-the-century issues that deal with women and the established church, her chapter on "Piety and Spirituality" is a treasure trove of helpful background. In fact, she uses Susanna Wesley (misspelling her given name with a final h) as an example of how "godliness and piety could develop a woman's sense of rectitude which would enable her to defy her husband" (pp. 95-96).

73. For instance, Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), defends her decision to omit any consideration of religious poetry: "I admit that in seventeenth-century England, religious values are social and political, but the issues are so complex that they would have required another framework besides that of gender ideology, which I have used. That would be another study, and one does what one can" (p. 10).

74. Patricia Crawford, "Women's Published Writings 1600-1700," in Mary Prior, ed.,

Women in English Society, 1500-1800 (London and New York, Methuen, 1985), p. 221. Other studies that take women's religious writing seriously include Sara Heller Mendelson, "Stuart women's diaries and occasional memoirs," ibid., pp. 181-210; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity:

English Women's Writing, 1649-88 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Felicity A.

Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women's

Literary History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

75. I have recounted in the introduction to chapter 9 of the letters, part I of this volume, the story of Hetty's forced marriage and the disruption it caused the family. For glimpses of the issue in S. W's letters, see those to her son John, 23 February 1724/25 and 12 October

1726:

76. For instance, S. W. claims a listing of a column and a half in Janet Todd, ed., A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660-1800 (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 319; a one-column entry in Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds., The Feminist

Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1990): p. 1150; and a brief (and somewhat misleading)

Introduction

paragraph in Maureen Bell, George Parfitt, and Simon Shepherd, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers, 1580-1720 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), p. 211.

77. See, for example, Mendelson, "Stuart Women's Diaries"; Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen's Private Diaries (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988);

Felicity A. Nussbaum, "Eighteenth-Century Women's Autobiographical Commonplaces," in Shari Bentock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988): pp. 147-171; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, pp. 54-75.

78. For example, Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Female Rhetorics," in Benstock, Private Self, p.

178, reads eighteenth-century letters to show how women developed rhetorical strategies allowing them to elucidate themselves without falling prey to the "troubling threat of egotism." The tension between self-deprecation and self-assertion pervades S. Ws letters and her other writings as well. (See Introduction to the Letters in part I of this volume) As Allison Weber has shown, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

1990): pp. 11, 48-50, 80-81, such rhetorical strategizing was not limited to eighteenthcentury English Protestant women.

79. Felicity A. Nussbuam performs a similar service for various forms of female "selfwriting" (diaries, commonplace books, and autobiographies), arguing that such texts both reproduce and challenge the reigning ideology. In the process of representing herself in the relatively safe space of her diary, a woman might in part "confirm the conventions for 'woman, but at the same time "alternative configurations of identity" might emerge

("Eighteenth-Century Women," p. 156). She further calls out for "mapping the territory of Restoration and eighteenth-century female autobiographical subjectivity more fully" and specifically incorporates "the spiritual autobiographers, including Quaker, Baptist, and Methodist journalists" into her wish list of future research (p. 151). In my analysis of S. W's diaries in part II of this volume, I have relied on Blodgett's book-length treatment of similar issues in Centuries of Female Days.

80. Elaine Hobby, examining seventeenth-century women who published religious books, discovered a "repertoire of devices to make their writing a 'modest' act" (Virtue of Necessity, p.

9). If women were to write and publish, both regarded as highly inappropriate, "immodest" activities, they could follow no better strategy than to assert divine approval, precisely the claim S. W. made in rationalizing her "publications." See ibid., p. 9 and chaps. 1 and 2, pp.

26-75, also part III of this volume. "Publication" for purposes of this discussion might be broadened to include any piece of writing intended for an audience of more than one, even if not commercially printed and distributed.

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Introduction to the Letters usanna Wesley's letters give us a better view of the whole person than do her larger theological and educational writings and her devotional journal. Theological and spiritual concerns are never far from the surface in her correspondence

(indeed, word for word, they predominate) and so are moments of introspection, but family news and relationships also frequently come up in interesting, though not always explicit, ways. The everyday world at least frames the theological and devotional content of the letters and enables the reader to fill in the life details and sketch more fully the worldview of this remarkable woman.

The collection presented in this part consists of 72 letters—74, if we count the second parts of two double letters. Because of their length and intentional composition, three additional letters have been grouped in part III as theological treatises.

The first extant letter dates from 1702, when Susanna was a young wife of 33, and the last, from 1741, when she was a 72-year-old widow, a year before her death.

Unfortunately, we have no writing of any kind from the period before her marriage.

However, each decade of the century, up to and including that of the 1740s, is represented, though some better and more consistently than others.

Most of the letters were written to family members. Not surprisingly, we have 36 letters to John, whose fame would ensure the saving and eventual archiving of a voluminous correspondence. Beginning with his time at Oxford, they focus intensely on issues of "practical divinity,' imparting theological advice appropriate for the various early career stages he was going through.

Slightly less than half that amount, 17, are addressed to Susanna's eldest son, Samuel Wesley Jr., owing in part to his keeping a letter book (his mother's idea) full of copied correspondence that has otherwise disappeared. All but two of these were written before the end of 1710, and they mainly consist of moral and spiritual counsel during his years as a scholar at Westminster School. Two letters illustrate her conversation with him as an adult, one during his teaching career at Westminster School and one near the end of his life when he was headmaster of Blundell's

School in Tiverton. oH

Letters Her youngest son, Charles, received at least nine, two of which were included in those double letters just mentioned that were sent as part of letters to John. She was writing Charles during and after his Oxford career, in part arguing against what she perceived to be theological exaggerations of her recently converted son.

Two letters are addressed to her husband, Samuel Wesley Sr., penned to defend her alleged liturgical irregularities while he was in London attending the Church of England convocation in early 1712. And her brother Samuel Annesley Jr., the East

India merchant, is represented by a long letter that both justifies her husband's lack of business acumen and pleads on behalf of her family, then as always in dire financial straits. Two of the three "letters" included in part III are addressed to Suky, her next to eldest daughter, and the third relegated to that part of this volume is the well-known letter to John recounting her child-rearing and educational approach.

Surviving letters to people outside the family number only nine. Two each were written to Lady Yarborough and the Rev. George Hickes, the earliest ones in this volume and four of the most interesting in the way they shed light on a political, religious, and marital quarrel between Susanna and her husband. Two were addressed to a neighboring clergyman, the Rev. Joseph Hoole, in 1710 and 1716; and one each was sent near the end of her life to two women friends or acquaintances,

Mrs. Alice Peard and the countess of Huntingdon. There is also one letter to an unknown person, a young clergyman seeking advice on how best to obtain ecclesiastical preferment.

We may surmise that this collection represents only a sampling of her letters, those that for one reason or another have survived. It is particularly disappointing that we have so few letters written to women. Correspondence with her grown daughters, her sister Ann Annesley in London, and other women relatives and friends was probably discarded at an early stage. Apart from the two treatises in letter form addressed to her daughter Susanna (in part III of this volume), there are only four in the entire collection, those mentioned above: the two to Lady Yarborough, the one to Alice Peard, and the one to the countess of Huntingdon.

I have been able to work from original manuscripts in most cases. The Methodist Archives (MA) at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, owns a number of holographs and also both Samuel Jr.'s (SWJr) and John's letter books (LB). An additional holograph each has surfaced at Wesley's Chapel, London; at the Melbourne Public Library in Australia; and in a private collection in London, all of which I have been able to examine in photocopied form. The first four letters in this series (the Yarborough and Hickes correspondence) were carefully edited for publication in 1953; as I judge these to be trustworthy, I have not sought out the originals. For a few, I necessarily depend on John Wesley's editing when he prepared a number of his mother's letters for publication in his Journal and in his Arminian

Magazine (AM) later in the century. For one other, I am at the mercy of George Stevenson, the nineteenth-century Methodist historian whose editorial work on dozens of letters is not always reliable.'

The chronological arrangement I follow allows the reader to witness the unfolding of Susanna Wesley's personality throughout a good portion of her life. Coincidentally, this sequence also breaks fairly conveniently into thematic sections, or chapters, to which I have prefixed brief introductions that give a sense of the per-

Introduction to the Letters

sonal, family, and theological issues in each. Endnotes also help with the identification of unfamiliar names and terms.

We need not be detained here with details on letters and letter writing in the eighteenth century, though such knowledge obviously enriches one's appreciation for Susanna's output.' More to the interpretive point and more helpful in the reading of these letters as literary texts is a recent perspective on the "strategies of deflection" used by women correspondents in that era.' Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued, "Eighteenth-century letters by women reflect and elucidate the conflict between the desire for self-assertion and the need for self-suppression."* A reading of Susanna Wesley's letters reveals a similar conflict and the development of a similar

"rhetoric" to help in the process of self-definition. The self-deprecation that Spacks finds in her research"? echoes again and again in Susanna's letters. However, that lip service to contemporary social convention is undercut by a deeply formed sense of self, a Puritan self-understanding that ultimately values the individual and empowers her when in conflict with "the world," however that might be construed. That sense of self allows her not only to love and support her family but also to advise, teach, argue with, and sometimes stubbornly resist even her husband, brother, and sons.

Notes 1. Memorials of the Wesley Family .

. (London: S. W. Patridge; New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), passim.

2. See Professor Frank Baker's excellent, concise introduction to his first volume of John

Wesley's correspondence:

The Works of John Wesley: Vol. 25. Letters I (1721-1739) (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1980), especially pp. 11-28 ("An Age of Correspondence").

> 3. Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Female Rhetorics,' in Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill and London: University of North

Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 177-191. Her analysis focuses on the letters of Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Mary Granville Delany (coincidentally, a sometime friend and correspondent of John Wesley).

4. Ibid., pp. 177-178.

5. Ibid., p. 188.

@ onE W Religious and Sexual Politics Yarborough and Hickes Correspondence he earliest extant Susanna Wesley letters stem from 1702, when she was a young wife of some 13 years, mother of six children, and for some five years the mistress of the Epworth rectory. They record the political quarrel that for six months disrupted her marriage. At issue was the legitimacy of William III's claim to the English throne. While most, Samuel Wesley included, supported his reign and the "Glorious Revolution" that brought him to power, a small, conscientious minority refused to take an oath to him and his consort, Mary, on the grounds that the deposed James II remained king by divine right. As these letters show, Susanna

Wesley put herself in that camp, writing to two members of the church's Nonjuring party for advice in her domestic dispute.

The incident also involves sexual politics, demonstrating how far a woman might go in resisting the will of her husband and on what grounds. In this case Susanna's

Puritan conscience, now serving (and being bolstered by) a sectarian right-wing Anglicanism, enabled the otherwise obedient 32-year-old wife to withstand the bluster of her politically more moderate 39-year-old husband. Having vowed to live apart from her until she apologized, the rector left for London in a huff. Far from accepting the charge of "pride and obstinacy," she felt herself to be "pretty innocent" and stood her ground until circumstances brought him back.

The story was known to John Wesley.' Indeed, when the quarrel was resolved (the rectory fire described in the second letter to George Hickes brought Samuel around), John Wesley himself, born the following June, was the most obvious result of the healed rift.

Lady Yarborough was born Henrietta Maria Blagge and had been a maid of honor of the duchess of York at Charles II's court. Thomas Yarborough, later a member of Parliament (MP), married her in 1663 and brought her to Snaith in a corner of Yorkshire just a few miles from Epworth. Susanna made her acquaintance there and trusted her Nonjuring sympathies enough to ask for advice. Lady Yarborough referred her to a much more eminent Nonjuror, the Rev. George Hickes. As a result of his principles, Hickes had been deprived of the deanship of Worcester and was

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by this time styled Suffragan Bishop of Thetford, one of the highest-ranked clerics in the samll schismatic movement.

The letters were discovered by Robert Walmsley in the early 1950s in a manuscript book, "The Genuine Remains of the Late Pious and Learned George Hickes,

D. D, and Suffragan Bishop of Thetford, consisting of Controversial Letters and Other Discourses." Walmsley published them in the Manchester Guardian, 3 July 1953, and soon thereafter in the Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, from which we reprint them here.

To Lady Yarborough 7 March 1702 Reprinted from Robert Walmsley, "John Wesley's Parents: Quarrel and Reconciliation," PWHS 29.3 (1953-1954): 52-53. Paragraphing introduced by Walmsley.

Occasional punctuation, indicated in brackets, and notes have been added in this volume.

To the lady Yarborough.

Saturday night March 7, 1701-2.

Madam I'm infinitely obliged to your Ladyship for your charming civility to a person so utterly unworthy of your favours, but oh Madam! I must tell your Ladyship you have somewhat mistaken my case. You advise me to continue with my husband and God knows how gladly I would do it but there, there is my extreme affliction[:] he will not live with me. (Tis but a littke while since he one evening observed in our

Family prayers I did not say Amen to his prayer for K[ing] W[illiam] as I usually do to all others; upon which he retired to his study, and calling me to him asked me the reason of my not saying Amen to the Prayer. I was a little surprised at the question and don't well know what I answered, but too too well I remember what followed: He immediately kneeled down and imprecated the divine Vengeance upon himself and all his posterity if ever he touched me more or came into a bed with me before I had begged God's pardon and his, for not saying Amen to the prayer for the K[in]g. \ This Madam is my unhappy case. I've unsuccessfully represented to him the unlawfulness and unreasonableness of his Oath; that the Man in that case has no more power over his own body than the Woman over her's; that since I'm willing to let him quietly enjoy his opinions, he ought not to deprive me of my little liberty of conscience. But he has opened his mouth to the Lord and w[ha]t help? What's past is Fate, nor can God or man recall the time that is actually elapsed, or undo an action once performed. I should be eternally obliged to your Ladyship would you be pleased to consult one of our Divines about it that might be trusted with such an important secret. 'Tis a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,' or to trifle with the divine Vengeance which we can never sufficiently deprecate. He is too great to be affronted or mocked, to[o] wise to be deceived, no artifice or

Letters evasion could possibly pass upon him were I so impious to attempt it. I have no resentment against my Master, so far from it that the very next day I went with him to the Communion, though he that night forsook my bed to which he has been a stranger ever since.

I'm almost ashamed to own what extreme disturbance this accident has given me, yet I value not the world. I value neither reputation[,] friends or anything in comparison of the single satisfaction, of preserving a conscience void of offence towards God and man;? and how I can do that if I mock almighty God, by begging pardon for what I think no sin, is past my discerning. But I am inexpressibly miserable, for I can see no possibility of reconciling these differences, though I would submit to anything or do anything in the world to oblige him to live in the house with me. I appeal to your Ladyship if my circumstances are not strangely unhappy.

I believe myself an Original of misery. I don't think there's any precedent of such a case in the whole world; and may I not say as the Prophet, "I am the person that has seen affliction."* I'm almost afraid I've already complied with him too far, but most humbly beg your Ladyship's direction.

Tamete:

S. Wesley.

I've a great deal more to say but am afraid of being troublesome, and ask pardon for what I've already given your Ladyship. My Master is for London at Easter, when

I hope I shall be able to wait on your Ladyship if I can live so long, and in the meantime earnestly desire your prayers and direction.

To Lady Yarborough 15 March 1702 Reprinted from Robert Walmsley, "John Wesley's Parents: Quarrel and Reconciliation," PWHS 29.3 (1953-1954): 53-54.

March 15 [1701-2] Madam The shortness of my time will I hope excuse the brevity of my answer. I'm extremely obliged to your Ladyship for your generous concern and pity of my misfortunes, and return my humblest thanks for your Letters, which have been a great cordial to me and given me unspeakable satisfaction. I find the Gentleman that has seen my Letters is of opinion that I ought not to comply any further, but persevere in following the dictates of my own conscience, which I hope is not erroneous. I thank God I'm much better satisfied in all things than I was, and find God has by these unusual afflictions vouchsafed me many favours; they have greatly inclined my mind to patience and a more entire resignation to the divine Will, I am not so much affected as formerly with these sublunary affairs, which as your Ladyship rightly observes are but for a time, and a very little inconsiderable time indeed. I've represented as long as I could be heard the sin of the Oath and ill consequences of it to my Master, but he cannot be convinced he has done ill, nor does the present change in State® make any alteration in his mind; I am persuaded nothing but an

Religious and Sexual Politics

omnipotent power can move him and there I leave it. He is for London at Easter where he designs to try if he can get a Chaplain's place in a Man of War.

I'm more easy in the thoughts of parting because I think we are not likely to live happily together. I have six very little children, which though he tells me he will take good care of, yet if anything should befall him at Sea we should be in no very good condition, but still I believe that that charitable Being which feeds the Ravens and cloathes the Lilies® will never think me or mine below his care and Providence, though none in the world is more unworthy of either. I've offered since I last writ to your Ladyship to put this business to a reference, provided I might choose one

Referee and my Master another, but I fancy he'll never agree to it. He is fearful of my communicating it to any person, which makes me somewhat more confined than usually, but when he is gone I hope I shall be able to wait on your Ladyship to discourse more fully of things, and to return you my repeated thanks as well as to confirm my sincere profession of being, Madam, your Ladyship's

S. W.

I am extremely concerned for Sir Thomas's illness and pray God to mitigate it, and in the meantime to sanctify all his afflictions.

I humbly beg the Gentleman would be careful that the world may know nothing which may reflect upon my

Master, but that the business may be concealed.

To George Hickes ? April 1702 Reprinted from Robert Walmsley, "John Wesley's Parents: Quarrell and Reconciliation, PWHS 29.3 (1953-1954): 54. The address at its close (Snaith) indicates this letter was written from Lady Yarborough's home, some 13 miles northeast of Epworth.

To the Rev Mr Dean Hickes Reverend Sir, I should not at this time trouble or divert your better thoughts, but you having been already acquainted by the Lady Yarborough with some uneasy circumstances I at present am under, and expressing so generous a pity and compassion for an-unfortunate stranger, makes me presume to beg your direction in this particular.

(My Master will not be persuaded he has no power over the conscience of his Wife, and though I believe he's somewhat troubled at his Oath yet cannot be persuaded 'tis not obligatory. He is now for referring the whole to the Archbishop of York and Bishop of Lincoln, and says if I will not be determined by them, he will do anything rather than live with a person that is the declared enemy of his country, which he believes himself obliged to love before all the world.

T very well know before such Judges I'm sure to be condemned without a fair hearing; nor can I see any reason I have to ask either God Almighty's or his pardon for acting according to the best knowledge I have of things of that nature. If I thought or could be persuaded I'm in an error I would freely retract it and ask his pardon before the whole world. He accuses me of pride and obstinacy and insists upon my making him satisfaction for the injury he believes I've done him. I dare not plead not guilty to such an Indictment, but yet I hope however I may in other

38 = Letters instances be culpable, in this I'm pretty innocent. I most humbly beg the favour of your direction and prayers, and your acceptance of most humble thanks and service from, Sir, your most humble Servant (Snaith).

S. Wesley My Master is at London, and the extreme difficulty of receiving a Letter when he's at home without his knowledge is the reason I would humbly beg the favour of a speedy answer.

To George Hickes 31 July 1702 Reprinted from Robert Walmsley, "John Wesley's Parents: Quarrel and Reconciliation,' PWHS, 29.3 (19531954) 55—56.

Reverend Sir, "Twas not want of the most grateful sense of your great charity and goodness made me so long defer writing, but some other reason which I shall acquaint you with when I wait on you. This however comes at last, though 'tis long first, with my humblest thanks for the great favour of yours which found me in circumstances that very much needed Acree Master was then at London and had given me time to consider what to do, whether I would submit to his judgment and implicitly obey him in matters of conscience. I foresaw a great many evils would inevitably befall me if I refused to satisfy his desires, and had scarce courage enough to support me in the melancholy prospect when your Letter came, which was the noblest cordial, and gave me the greatest satisfaction of any thing in my whole life.

When he returned he absolutely refused a reference, and so I thought it unnecessary to write to the Archbishop. He stayed two days and then left me early one morning with a resolution never to see me more, but the infinite Power that disposes and overrules the minds of men as he pleases, and can speak to their wild unreasonable passions as he does to the waves of the sea, hitherto shalt thou go and no farther,' so ordered it, that in his way he met a Clergyman to whom he communicated his intentions, and the reason that induced him to leave his Family: He extremely pitied him and condemned me, but however, he prevailed with him to return,

But as it often happens that great mischiefs take their rise froin very small beginnings, so his long absenting himself upon that account occasioned abundance of trouble to himself and Family; the particulars of which I shall not, Sir, at present trouble you with, but if I live to see you as I hope I shall, I must beg the liberty of informing you of as strange a complication of misfortunes as perhaps as ever happened to any persons in the world. Yet though I've had so much trouble, since Sir you have fully satisfied me I do my duty in following the dictates of my conscience,

I will as you advise persevere, and against hope believe in hope, since I know after all there is an inseparable connection betwixt virtue and happiness; for let it be granted that a vicious person may and often does find a great deal of present satisfaction in the enjoyment of their irregular inclinations and desires, yet we can by no means allow that to be any part of a rational Happiness that is immediately succeeded by ungrateful reflections, and must inevitably end in unspeakable eternal misery: so on the other side though Virtue may be here oppressed and despised, yet as sure as God himself has said it the end of Virtue is peace and endless Felicity.

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I'm afraid I'm troublesome already, yet must once more beg direction in some other cases when I know how to write; I'm forced at present to give my Lady

Yarborough the trouble of superscribing my Letter. Before I've finished my Letters

I'm alarmed by a new misfortune; my house is now fired by one of my servants, I think not carelessly but by so odd an accident as I may say of it, as the Magicians of Moses's fourth Miracle, "This is the finger of God." ® Two thirds are burnt, and most of our goods though they have escaped the flames are utterly spoiled. May heaven avert all evil from my children and grant that the heavy curse my Master has wished upon himself and Family may terminate in this life. I most earnestly beg the continuance of your prayers, that God may at last have mercy upon us, at least that he would spare the innocent Children however he is pleased to deal with the unhappy parents. I am Sir

Your most obliged humble Servant.

S. Wesley Epworth, July ult{imo,] 1702.

Notes 1. See Robert Walmsley, "John Wesley's Parents: Quarrel and Reconciliation,' PWHS 29.3

(1953-1954): 50, quoting Wesley's own accounat in AM, 1784, p. 606 and the version Adam

Clarke recorded in Memoirs of the Wesley Family; Collected Principally from Original Documents (New

York: N. Bangs and T. Mason for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1824), p. 83.

2. Hebrews 10:31.

. Close paraphrase of Acts 24:16.

. Lamentations 3:1; quotation marks added.

. The king's death on March 8. This note appears in brackets in the PWHS edition.

See Psalm 147:9; Luke 12:24, 27.

. Job 38:11, closely paraphrased.

. Exodus 8:19; quotation marks added.

¢@ two "Dear Sammy"

Samuel Wesley Jr. School Correspondence he next grouping of letters was sent to the 'Wesleys' eldest child, Samuel Jr., between March 1704 and February 1707, his first years away from home. Young

Samuel had been born in London in 1690 before the family moved to Lincolnshire, first to South Ormsby and finally to Epworth. Education at his mother's knee did not begin propitiously: the family story had it that he did not speak until the age of four or five, though then, quite suddenly, in a complete sentence.' Nevertheless, he became the first object of the home-schooling enterprise, which Susanna Wesley later detailed in a famous letter to her son John, included in part III of this volume.

In 1704 Samuel was sent to Westminster School in London to begin the rudiments of a classical education and prepare for university and, ultimately, the priesthood.

These letters to her adolescent son are full of an anxious parent's normal apprehensions when a first child leaves home. In addition, however, they bespeak a teacher's concern that sound moral and religious education continue. This emphasis becomes a hallmark of her calling and reappears later, not only in letters to her sons

John and Charles, but also in educational materials prepared for her daughters.

The young Samuel Wesley matriculated at Christ Church College, Oxford, and upon graduation was recalled to teach at Westminster, where he was also ordained.

Having hitched his career to the ill-fated Francis Atterbury (banished for his supposed part in a plot to return the Pretender to power), Wesley was passed over for advancement both in school and in church. His only chance for promotion came in 1732, when he accepted the headmastership of Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon, where he was able to offer brief hospitality to his widowed mother in 1736 and where he died three years later.

In these early letters, his mother discourses on natural and revealed religion and on the moral standards she would have him follow. In addition to long passages of typical "reasonable" religion, occasional glimmers of family life do appear, including her request that he transcribe her letters for future use, her disappointment at an instance of apparently poor school performance, the story of a drunken parishioners

(deserved?) death, and an admission that her abstemiousness (and her own rule as

"Dear Samm ry" 4] an adolescent to balance time spent in exercise with time spent on her devotions) might not be appropriate for her son." Diffusing this entire section of correspondence is her special concern for "Sammy," her first-born son.

That the letters survived at all is a tribute to the young man's heedful discipline.

They are preserved not in original form but in response to his mother's request as part of a letter book, into which he laboriously copied them nearly word for word.

To Samuel Wesley Jr.

11 March 1704 MA; SW)Jr Letter Book, pp. 9-34 [Greeting and a number of pages missing. |

. teaches us to pray that we might conform to the will of God [?]here on earth, as those pure and happy spirits did in heaven.

The eternal law with respect to man is called the law of reason; when 'tis more clearly explained by revelation, divine; when it orders natural agents, which obey it unwittingly yet constantly and regularly, we style it the law of nature and instinct.

And you may here take notice that in the observation of his law consists the happiness of all creatures, and 'tis only that which conserves the being and composes the harmony which we observe in the works of the creator. God made a law for the rain and gave his decree to the sea that the waves thereof should not pass his commandment. And should nature swerve ever so little from those rules God has prescribed her; should the principal elements of which all things are composed suspend or lose their native qualities; if the frame of the heavenly arch erected over our heads were loosened or dissolved; if celestial spheres should forget their regular motions and turn away as might happen; if the sun that rejoiceth as a giant to run his race should neglect his wonted course or the moon wander from her beaten way, the various seasons of the year mix and become disordered, the winds cease and the clouds afford no rain—the earth would pine for want of their influence and could produce no fruits, and what would become of man for whose use all these things were created?

And if God has taken such care of natural agents to prepare a law for them and to secure their obedience to it, we may conclude that he would not suffer man to be without law, since, if he were, he must be the most miserable of all beings in the world. It's therefore plain and undeniable that God has also given a law to mankind because their nature requires it. He has a right to do it as creator, wisdom and goodness to direct our actions to what is best, and power to enforce his laws by rewards and punishments of infinite weight and duration.

Now by what has been said, you may learn that a law is the rule of an action.

Now where this is taken from the nature of things and respects rational voluntary agents, 'tis called moral, and our agreement or conformity to it, a moral virtue. The law of reason (which is the foundation of morality) is also (and not improperly) called the law of nature, because 'tis not only a rule of action to rational voluntary agents but 'tis a rule we are capable of discerning by our natural light without the

Letters assistance of revelation. So you plainly perceive you are obliged as a man to observe all the precepts of morality or natural religion, though you had never heard of Christ or Moses. I cannot here enumerate all the particulars of this great law. I shall therefore only hint at those that are most obvious and easy to be understood. I intend you an entire discourse upon it when I have more time.

The first thing that seems dictated by nature's law is self-preservation. I know that Christians generally hold that the glory of God and increase of his kingdom should be first in our desires and designs. And in order to it we should chiefly aim at being virtuous and religious. But forasmuch as virtuous life presupposes life, I think the first thing nature teaches us is the care of our life and to avoid all penury or want of those things that sustain and preserve it. Hence it was that, as soon as mankind became sensible of want and conscious of their weakness when single and alone, they began to form societies, then communities and regular governments; and from the same desire of self-preservation all human laws which tend to the welfare of mankind take their rise.

I've already told you by what method of thinking you might come to the certain knowledge of a God. Whether or no mankind at first attained the idea of a God by the same way concerns not us to know, since we find in the first ages of the world men's reason did teach them to believe a supreme independent Being. Nor does natural religion only teach us to believe his existence, but it likewise assures us that he is the creator and governor of all things, and that nothing can justly be attributed to him that implies the least imperfection; that he is one we may discern also by the light of nature, because many infinities is a palpable contradiction.

All his fore mentioned attributes we may plainly perceive by the same light. As also the first principles of natural religion, which is founded on the knowledge of God and our selves.

We may distinguish the propositions of natural religion into theoretical and practical. I've already said enough of the first. I proceed to the second and shall divide the propositions of practical natural religion into two parts: first the internal, secondly the external worship of God.

The internal part consists in honouring and loving God. His honour proceeds from a high opinion of his power, wisdom, justice, truth, etc.; hence we learn to fear his power and justice, to adore his wisdom, to acquiesce in his will, and to depend on his veracity. From our belief of his goodness we learn to love him, particularly for the effects of it towards us.

The external worship of God is chiefly shown in these instances: that we pray to him for what we want and give thanks to him for what we receive, and this not only privately, but publicly, to show we are not ashamed of our devotions and to excite others to do the like.

We learn by the law of nature likewise a great part of our duty to ourselves and neighbours. Our duty to ourselves is the practice of all moral virtues in order to perfect our natures, and therefore upon our own account, we are obliged to practice all social virtues, since we cannot be completely virtuous without it.

Moral virtues have been divided into two parts. The principal are reckoned four, viz. prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. The others are called magnanimity, magnificence, liberality, modesty, gentleness, courtesy, truth, and urbanity. Of your

"Dear Sammy"

duty to your neighbour I shall speak more particularly when I come to tell you your obligations as a member of a community.

Perhaps you may here ask what need there was of revelation if man were capable of knowing and worshiping God without it. To which I answer that the effects of natural religion considered with regard to the present state of mankind are concluded within the prospect of this life. I say considered with regard to the present state of man, for we are to consider him now not as he was first created, perfect and innocent, but fallen from his primitive purity, and so obnoxious to the justice and wrath of God. Now though all men may clearly perceive their pravity and a strong propension in themselves to moral evil, yet no man's reason, nay not the united reason of all mankind, could ever discover how their natures became defective, nor by what means they must now escape that justice or appease the anger of the Almighty, had not he mercifully revealed it to them.

Again, consider, though the works of nature in every part of them carry sufficient evidence of a deity, and natural reason could discern him and the duties of natural religion, yet in process of time the greatest part of the world made so little use of their reason, that they became ignorant of God and the true way of worshipping him. Sense and passion blinded some; and a careless inadvertency in others and wrong apprehensions in most of them that believed any supreme beings misled mankind into superstition and polytheism, and that occasioned infinite error and mischief in the world. And though the rational and thinking part of mankind, when they sought after him, found the supreme invisible God, yet they acknowledged him and worshipped him in their own minds, they kept the truth locked up as a secret in their own breasts and very rarely suffered it to go any further, and so were not likely to do much good to the bulk of mankind. Nor were those men of thought easily to be found; their number was small, and those few scattered throughout the world. We find but one, Socrates in Athens, who disbelieved polytheism and laughed at their wrong notions of a deity; and you know how they rewarded him for it. And so much had superstition and idolatry prevailed, that whatever Plato and the soberest philosophers thought of the being and nature of a God, they were forced in their outward professions and worship to go along with the herd and keep to the religion established by law. Thus, whatever light there was in the works of the creation and providence to lead men to the knowledge of the true God, yet very few found him; but the generality of the world were so much in the dark that they thought the Godhead like to gold and silver and stone, graven by art and man's device.

The knowledge of God and the law of nature is no way to be attained without the assistance of revelation, but by a train of deductions from self-evident principles, which the greatest part of mankind had neither leisure to weigh nor (for want of using their reason) skill to judge of. But whether this was the chief cause, or any of those already mentioned, 'twas plain in fact men failed in their great and proper business of morality. Nor was the law of nature collected into an entire body or practised to any purpose till the coming of our Saviour.

Thus revelation became very necessary to lead man into the knowledge of God's unity and his other perfections, as well as to instruct men in their duty towards him. Those moral virtues which were necessary to hold societies together and pre-

Letters serve the quiet of governments was indeed taught by the civil laws of communities and some obedience to 'em forced from men by their magistrates; but even in this case their virtue was very defective, and the just measures of right and wrong stood not on their surest basis, I mean a universal belief of a God, superintending the actions of all mankind in order to a future retribution. Their thoughts of another life were at best but very obscure and expectations uncertain. They sometimes talked of manes and shades of departed men, of Styx and Acheron and Elysian fields, which they fancied the seats of the blessed; but they received these notions from their poets and took 'em rather for inventions of wit and ornaments of poetry than for truths that were to influence their practice. The immortality of the soul and a future state was never made an article of faith till men had the light of revelation.

It may be you may ask whether the revelation the Jews received by Moses did not teach men all this and was not sufficient without that by Jesus Christ. I answer,

No. It was not sufficient for all men. For though the knowledge of one invisible

God and the moral law was revealed to the Jews, yet they were confined to a corner of the world and by the very law they received from Moses, excluded from commerce with the rest of mankind. Therefore the gentile world could have no great benefit by the law of Moses. What attestation they had of the miracles on which the Jews built their faith they received chiefly from the Jews themselves: a people contemned and despised by those nations that knew them, and therefore very unfit to propagate the faith or worship of God in the world.

And it was long enough after the law had been given on Mount Sinai that men were entirely given up to idolatry and immersed in all manner of vice and wickedness; even the Jews, God's peculiar people, forgot and forsook the laws of their fathers and worshipped the gods of those very nations which were delivered into their own hands by God himself for a punishment of their unreasonable idolatry.

And though God sent his servants the prophets to admonish 'em, and they frequently warned them of that destruction that would inevitably overtake them if they did not reform and return to their obedience to the law of the true God, yet so miserably were they corrupted and hardened that they would not hearken to the voice of God speaking by his prophets till they were conquered and carried captive into Babylon. Nay, after God pitied their miserable captivity and brought 'em back to their own country and assisted them against their enemies, and they had rebuilt their temple and renewed their covenant with the Almighty, they relapsed into all their former sins (idolatry excepted) and continued impenitent even after the coming of our Saviour till they were at last utterly defeated and ruined by Titus, son to Vespasian, the tenth emperor of Rome.

In this wretched state of darkness and error our Saviour found mankind and brought light and immortality to light by his coming. "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the Devil." * And this could no way be done but by a complete morality established in all its parts upon its true foundations to which man might have recourse upon all occasions. And upon its true foundations morality could never be fixed without a clear knowledge of the lawmaker and a just acknowledgement of him and belief of the rewards and punishments prepared for those that would or would not obey him.

"Dear Sammy"

Twas also necessary for the common salvation that this law should be promulged* with that authority it was, for nothing less than an assurance of Jesus's being the Messiah and a clear evidence of his mission could be able to prevail upon such men to repent and conform to his doctrine. For this reason our blessed Saviour wrought so many miracles in the view of all the world. And as his love and pity to unhappy men was universal, so he broke down the wall of sanction between the Jews and gentiles and did not confine his miracles and doctrine to the worshippers at Jerusalem, but he preached at Samaria and wrought miracles in the borders of Tyre and Sidon, and people followed him from all quarters. And so publicly were his miracles wrought, as well as those of his apostles, that the enemies of Christianity have never dared openly to deny them.

I've already observed that we could neither know how we became depraved, nor by what means we must be reconciled to the offended Deity. "Tis true by the power of natural reason we might have attained some knowledge of God and our own minds, but I cannot see how we could have had any certain knowledge of the being and orders of the angels or that some of them fell from their primitive purity and became devils, had we been without revelation. Nor could we have discovered by our natural light that through the temptations of those apostate spirits, our first parents (in whom were virtually included the whole species of mankind) lost their innocence. And that by eating of that fatal tree of the knowledge [of good and evil] they forfeited the tree of life and with it bliss and immortality.

Whoever reads and carefully observes the tenor of the New Testament will find the whole doctrine of redemption is founded on the supposition of Adams fall. Nor can they fail to observe that as our first parents lost paradise, so all their posterity were born out of it in a state of sin and mortality. But as in Adam all died, so in Christ were all made alive,' that is were brought into a salvable condition.

You see now plainly the use and necessity of revelation and the reasons why the blessed Jesus condescended to assume humanity: that he might satisfy the justice of God by the sacrifice of himself for us; that he might plant good life among men and give us an example of perfect obedience to the divine will, which, though we are not absolutely capable of following, yet he hath taught us that our sincere endeavours to do our duty shall be accepted, though we fail in the performance. And though we often fall, we may rise again by faith and repentance. For which reason he has vouchsafed us the assistance of his Holy Spirit, and 'tis no small encouragement to a man under the difficulty of his nature, beset with temptations and surrounded with prevailing custom, to practice true religion, to be assured he shall be assisted by an almighty Power that can preserve and support him in a constant and steady course of virtue.

I hope what has been said has convinced you there was great need of revelation.

I come now to the second thing I proposed, which was to show you what you are obliged to as a Christian. And here I shall distinguish your duty into two parts of equal consideration, viz. faith and obedience.

First, of faith. You are most firmly to believe that the man Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, when Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, in the reign of Augustus, second?

Letters [Two sides, one manuscript (MS) sheet, pp. 25-26 of SWJr Letter Book, are missing, breaking the flow of the letter. ]

. [con]formity as far as possible to all the precepts of the moral law or law of reason which he has confirmed and established, and all moral virtues are now become Christian virtues. Think not (says our Saviour) I am come to destroy the law and the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill,° the meaning of which is, he came not only to fulfill the predictions of the prophets concerning

[him]' the Messiah, but also to complete, advance and give authority to the moral precepts of Moses his law, which was founded on the eternal law of reason and to free this law from the corrupt glosses the scribes and pharisees had put upon it.

And this seems to be the main and proper intention of Christianity.

I proceed to the particulars of your obedience, and what they are you may best learn from our Saviour's own mouth. He began his preaching with a command to repent, St. Matthew 4.17.8 And this, considering the fallen state of mankind, was most necessary to be first taught. Everyone of common sense knows that Repentance implies forsaking of, as well as sorrow for, sin. And, that unless men are convinced they have done amiss, they are never likely to become better.

Therefore, it was agreeable to the wisdom of our blessed Saviour to inculcate that duty first which must be first practiced in order to a good life. He proceeds in the fifth chapter to command men to be exemplary in good works. "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven."? And after he had confirmed the moral law, verse 17, he goes on to explain it and tells them that not only murder, but causeless anger and contemptuous words were forbidden. He forbids not only actual impurity, but irregular and unchaste desires, upon pain of condemnation. All swearing in conversation as well as forswearing in judgement. And so strictly does he forbid all malice and revenge, that he positively commands men to love their enemies, to do good to those that hate them, and to pray for such as despitefully use and persecute them; and closes all his particular injunctions with this general rule: "all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets." '° From what our Saviour has anywhere forbidden we may learn those positive duties he commands, which are always included in his prohibitions. Thus by forbidding murder, causeless anger and words of contempt, he commands that we contribute all we reasonably may towards the preservation of our neighbour's life, goods, and fame. To be compassionate and liberal, patient, meek, courteous and friendly to all mankind. By forbidding impure desires, looks, etc., he commands unspotted chastity in heart and life. By prohibiting customary or unnecessary oaths, he enjoins a useful innocent conversation, free from pride or passion which usually leads men into that unreasonable practice.

But our blessed Saviour goes further and directs °em to the highest and most noble part of Christian life, which consists in loving God. When the lawyer asked our Lord what he should do to inherit eternal life, he said, "What is written in the law, how readest thou?" He answered, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all the mind, and with all thy strength, and thy

"Dear Samm ay" 47 neighbour as thyself." Jesus said, "This do and thou shalt live," 'l that is, shalt be eternally happy, for happiness in scripture is usually called life.

By this answer of our Saviour we may learn that to love the eternal ever-blessed

God with the full power and energy of the soul is the principal duty of a Christian and the complement of Christian perfection and happiness.

Love is a simple act or motion of the soul whereby it is carried towards and presses to a union with the beloved object, which is always apprehended to be good.'* Now to make this act or motion of the soul truly rational 'tis necessary, first, that the object be really good as it appears to be. And that the degree of love hold proportion with the degree of goodness in the object beloved.

The first part of this rule we are sure to follow in our loving God, since he is all perfect and amiable. The second can't be strictly observed, because no act of a finite being can bear any proportion to what is infinite. However, we must go as far as we can and love him to the utmost of our capacity. And this love to God must be predominant over all our love to any creature whatever, as our blessed Saviour teaches us in the tenth of St. Matthew. He that loveth father or mother or son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.'* Nay, he goes farther in the fourteenth of St. Luke and says, "If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters" (where they stand in competition with him), "yea, and his own life also, cannot be my disciple." '*

This is sufficient to show what love our Lord requires.

'Tis an opinion that hath been commonly received that there are two sorts of love: a love of benevolence or good will and a love of complacency or delight.'>

This, I think, is an error that arises from a want of clear ideas of the nature of love, which, as I said before, is a simple act or motion of the soul and determined to its several modes and operations by the nature of the thing beloved. If we have an idea of positive, absolute perfection in the object of our love, as in God, then the acts of our love are adoration, praise, complacency,'® etc. And we do not wish well to or desire to benefit him, because we are assured his most glorious perfection and infinite essential happiness are incapable of any admission.'' And since his most blessed nature can receive no advantage from his creatures, we express our love to God by being friendly and beneficent to all that bear his image and are ever ready to do good offices where we perceive the smallest ray of his divinity.

There are two natural effects of love which are inseparable from it, viz. a desire to please and a desire to enjoy. These in divine love are the springs of all those virtuous actions and religious duties we perform. Thus we endeavour to perfect our natures by recovering that image of God we lost in Adam, which alone can render us pleasing to that most holy Being and qualify us for the beatific vision we hope to enjoy when we have put off our mortality and are admitted into the region of happy spirits and "just men made perfect." '*

God is the true and proper centre!" of the mind, towards which it had always regularly moved, had not sin interposed and cast a shade between him and its noblest faculties. But however as depraved as it is, it can nowhere find rest or an adequate lasting happiness on this side its ever-blessed and glorious Creator; nor must you ever expect to please or enjoy him unless you obey all his commandments.

And this obedience is the only way to evidence the sincerity of your love to him.

Letters That you may more perfectly know and obey the law of God, be sure you constantly pray for the assistance of the Holy Spirit. Observe that assistance implies a joint concurrence of the person assisted; nor can you possible be assisted if you do nothing. Therefore, use your utmost care and diligence to do your duty and rely upon the veracity of God, who will not fail to perform what he has promised.

Besides the promise of his Holy Spirit he has already given us the Holy Scripture, which is a perfect rule of faith and manners. This read and study constantly and, in all cases that occur where you want direction, have recourse to the law and to the testimony. And if there be any thing therein you cannot understand, your father will gladly assist you; or if you have not time to write, your master*° or any good man you are acquainted with will very willingly instruct you in the way to salvation.

I should proceed to give you some particular directions for your devotions, etc.

But I'm afraid I have already tried your patience too far and will therefore omit them till I come to discourse of the last thing I proposed, which was the virtues of a social life or your obligations as a member of a community, which shall be the subject of another letter.

To God's blessed protection I commit you and earnestly beseech him that his Holy Spirit may illuminate and steer your soul through all the changing scenes of life and at the last conduct you to his eternal glory.

Susanna Wesley Epworth. March 11 An[no]: Domf[ini]: 1704

To Samuel Wesley Jr.

N.d. (possibly late spring or early summer 1704) MA; SWJr Letter Book, pp. 35-37. The bottom of the last page, where Samuel usually notes the date and address, is cut out. George Stevenson, Memorials of the Wesley Family .

. (London: S. W. Partridge; New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), 182-183, dates it 4 August 1704. Perhaps he saw the missing piece; more likely he has identified it with the succeeding letter, clearly dated 4 August 1704.

Dear Sammy!

I've been ill a great while, but am now, I thank God, well recovered. I thought to have been with you long ere this, but I doubt I shall hardly see you this summer.

Therefore send me word particularly what you want.

I would ere now ha' finished my discourse, begun so long ago, if I had enjoyed more health, but I hope I shall be able to finish it quickly and then would have you transcribe all your letters, for they may be more useful to you afterwards than they are now, because you'll be better able to understand them.

I shall be employing my thoughts on useful subjects for you when I have time, for I desire nothing in this world so much as to have my children well instructed in the principles of religion, that they may walk in the narrow way which alone leads to happiness. Particularly, I am concerned for you, who were even before your birth dedicated to the service of the altar, that you may be an ornament of that

"Dear Sammy"

Church of which you are a member and be instrumental (if God shall spare your life) in bringing many souls to heaven. Take heed, therefore, in the first place of your own, lest you yourself should be a castaway.

You have had great advantages of education. God has entrusted you with many many talents, such as health, strength, a comfortable subsistence hitherto, a good understanding, memory, etc. And if any one be misemployed or not improved, they will certainly one day rise up in judgement against you.

If I thought you would not make good use of instruction and be the better for reproof, I would never write or speak a word to you more while I live, because | know whatever I could do would but tend to you[r] greater condemnation. But | earnestly beg of God to give you his grace. And I charge you, as you will answer for it at the last great day, that you carefully "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," '' lest you should finally miscarry.

You say you know not how to keep a secret without sometimes telling a lie. I don't know what secrets you may have. I'm sure nobody with you has authority however to examine you, but if any should be so impertinently curious to do it, put 'em civilly off if you can. But if you can't, resolutely tell 'em you will not satisfy their unreasonable desires and be sure you never, to gain the favour of any, hazard losing the favour of God, which you will do if you speak falsely.

To God's merciful protection I commit you.

Susanna Wesley [The last quarter of the page is torn off at this point. | To Samuel Wesley Jr.

N.d. or 4 August 1704 MA; SWJr Letter Book, p. 38 or pp. 38-43. Manuscript pp. 39-40 are missing; thus there may be two letters here.

Dear Sammy!

'Tis a great while since I heard from you, but yet I hope you are in health. Be sure you write to me next post.

I am very sorry that I should have any reason to complain of or find fault with you at this distance, but you have not answered the expectation I had of you at all.

I thought you would have been so wise when you so well knew our circumstances and how hard a thing it is for us that have had such uncommon misfortunes and have so many children beside yourself to maintain you at such a place. I say I thought and hoped you would have used your utmost care and diligence to surpass all others in virtue and learning, but instead of that I find you do not so much as KeCD Dace. ast [The bottom quarter of the page is missing: perhaps a maternal indictment of Samuel's slow progress at school, later removed by an embarrassed member of the family or Methodist hagiographer; MS pp. 39-40 are also missing. |

. er obligation than others that are not so, to "let your light so shine before

SO Letters men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which in Heaven." *"

Examine well your heart and observe its inclinations; particularly observe what the general temper of your mind is, for let me tell you 'tis not a fit of devotion now and then speaks a man a Christian but 'tis a mind universally and generally disposed to all the duties of Christianity in their proper times, places, etc. For instance, in the morning and evening or any other time when occasion is offered, a good Christian will be cheerfully disposed to retire from the world that he may offer to his creator his sacrifice of prayer and praise and will account it is happiness, as well as duty, so to do. When he is in the world, if he have business, he will follow it diligently, as knowing that he must account with God at night for what he has done in the day, and that God expects we should be faithful in our calling, as well as devout in our closets. A Christian ought and in the general does converse with the world like a stranger in an inn; he will use what is necessary for him and cheerfully enjoy what he innocently can, but at the same time he knows it is but an inn. And he will be but little concerned at what he meets with there, because he takes it not for his home. The mind of a Christian should be always composed, temperate, free from all extremes of mirth or sadness, and always disposed to hear the still small voice of God's Holy Spirit, which will direct him what and how to act in all the occurrences of life, if in all his ways he acknowledge him and depend on his assistance. I cannot now stay to speak of your particular duties. I hope I shall in a short time send you what I designed.

In the mean time I beg of you as one that has the greatest concern imaginable for your soul, I exhort you as I am your faithful friend, and I command you as | am your parent, to use your utmost "diligence to make your calling and election sure." *> To be faithful to your God. And after I've said that, I need not bid you be industrious in your calling.

Sammy! Think of what I say, and the blessed God make you truly sensible of your duty to him and also to me. Renew your broken vows; if you have wasted or misemployed your time, take more care of what remains. If in anything you want counsel or advice, speak freely to me and I'll gladly assist you.

I commit you to God's blessed protection.

Susanna Wesley August. 4. 1704

Notes 1. Adam Clarke, Memoirs of the Wesley Family; Collected Principally from Original Documents (New

York: N. Bangs and T. Mason for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1824), pp. 213-214.

2. See, respectively, n.d. (?) Summer 1704; n.d. or 4 August 1704, 22 May 1706, 27 November 1707.

1 John 3:8; quotation marks added.

. Archaic equivalent of promulgated.

5. Close paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 15:22.

. Close paraphrase of Matthew 5:17.

7. Brackets in MS.

"Dear Sammy"

8. S.W's citation in MS. The AV translation reads, "From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

9. Matthew 5:16; quotation marks added.

10. Matthew 7:12; quotation marks added.

11. Luke 10:27—28, slightly altered; quotation marks added.

12. Cf John Norris, The Theory and Regulation of Love.

, 2nd ed. (London: S. Manship, 1694), p. 25, where Norris characterizes love in general as "a Motion of the Soul towards

Good," and the "love of Concupiscence or Desire" as a "simple Tendency of the Soul to Good."

13. Matthew 10:37—38, condensed.

14. Luke 14:26; quotation marks added.

15. Cf. two other related discussions, one in her "Obedience to the Laws of God: A Brief

(Unfinished) Exposition on the Ten Commandments," in part III of this volume, written c.

1709-1711; the other a brief reference to the distinction made by the philospher John Norris in a letter to John Wesley, 30 March 1726. The Norris distinction is between "love of benevolence" and "love of desire" in his "A Discourse concerning the Excellency of Praise and Thanksgiving," in [Practical] Discourses upon Several Divine Subjects, 3rd ed. (London: Samuel

Manship, 1697), 2:92—93. See a related discussion in her spiritual journal in part II of this volume.

16. Disposition to please, oblige, or comply with the wishes of others.

17. In two similar passages, one in another letter to Samuel, the other in her unfinished exposition of the Decalogue in her discussion of the first commandment, S. W. uses "accession" (i.e., addition, augmentation, increase). The OED does not indicate any equivalent meaning of "admission." See To Samuel Wesley Jr., 27 November 1707; and part III, chapter

3, "Obedience to the Laws of God: A Brief (Unfinished) Exposition on the Ten Commandments."

18. Hebrews 12:23; quotation marks added.

19. The SWJr Letter Book spells it center, an acceptable alternative at the time. However,

"centre" won out as the preferred British spelling.

20. That is, schoolmaster.

21. Philippians 2:12; quotation marks added.

22. Matthew 5:16; quotation marks added.

23. 2 Peter 1:10, quotation marks added.

@ THREE W

More Letters to "Dear Sammy" usanna Wesley's correspondence with her son continues, but our record of it is

incomplete. A gap of nearly two years (between consecutively numbered pages of his Letter Book) probably is explained by Susanna's reference to a theft in her letter of 18 March 1707. Samuel probably had accumulated a large batch of her letters and lost them before he had the opportunity to copy them.

To Samuel Wesley Jr.

22 May 1706 MA, SWJr Letter Book, pp. 44-47.

Dear Sammy!

You cannot imagine how much your letter pleased me, wherein you tell me of your fear lest you should offend God; though if you state the case truly, I hope there is no danger of doing it in the matter you speak of.

Proper drunkenness does, I think, certainly consist in drinking such a quantity of strong liquor as will intoxicate and render the person incapable of using his reason with that strength and freedom as he can do at other times. Now there are those that by habitual drinking a great deal of such liquors can hardly ever be guilty of proper drunkenness, because never intoxicated; but this I look upon as the highest kind of the sin of intemperance.

But this is not, nor I hope ever will be your case. Two glasses cannot possibly hurt you, provided they contain no more than those commonly used. Nor would I have you concerned, though you find yourself warmed and cheerful after drinking

'em, for 'tis a necessary effect of spirituous liquors to refresh and increase the spirits; and certainly the divine Being will never be displeased at the innocent satisfaction of our regular appetites.

But then have a care. Stay at the third glass; consider you have an obligation to oy

More Letters to "Dear Sammy"

strict temperance, which all have not. I mean your designation to holy orders. Remember under the Jewish economy it was ordained by God himself that the snuffers of the temple should be perfect gold;' from which we may infer that those that are admitted to serve at the altar, a great part of whose office it is to reprove others, ought themselves to be most pure and free from all scandalous actions; and if others are temperate, they ought to be abstemious.

Here happened last Thursday a very sad accident. You may remember one Robert Darwin of this town. This man was at Bawtry fair, where he got drunk, and, riding homeward down a hill, his horse came down with him, and he, having no sense to guide himself, fell down with his face to the ground and put his neck out of joint.

Those with him immediately pulled it in again, and he lived till next day, but never spake more. His face was torn all to pieces, one of his eyes beat out and his under lip cut off, his nose broke down, and in short he was one of the dreadfullest examples of the severe justice of God that I have known.

I have been the more particular in this relation, because the man, as he was one of the richest in this place, so he was one of the most implacable enemies your father had among his parishioners, one that insulted him most basely in his troubles, one that was most ready to do him all the mischief he could, not to mention his affronts to me and the children. And how heartily he wished to see our ruin, which God permitted him not to see. This man and one more has been now cut off in the midst of their sins, since your father's confinement.' I pray God amend those that are left.

Iam, Dear Sammy!

Your faithfull Epworth. May Friend and mother

22. A.D. 1706

Susanna Wesley To Samuel Wesley Jr.

18 March 1706/07 MA; SWJr Letter Book, pp. 70-74.

Dear Sammy!

I'm sorry you have lost my letters. Not that they contain anything very valuable, but because you have not now so many witnesses of my great love for you and unfeigned desire of your eternal happiness.

What use any person can make of 'em is past my comprehension! Or for what end any should be so impertinently curious to steal letters from a mother to a son that concerns none but himself, I cannot imagine. However, I hope you remember the main things which are therein expressed; but lest you should not, | shall again repeat some things which by the good blessing of God may be useful to you.

Be sure always to retain a firm belief of the being and perfections of the eternal ever-blessed God. Remember he is your Creator, to whom you owe your being; your governor, whose most holy laws you are indispensably obliged to obey.

Endeavour to impress upon your mind the reason for which you were created;

Letters not only to eat, drink, etc. and perform other natural actions relating only to this life, but to know, love and obey God.

This life is nothing in comparison to eternity! So very inconsiderable and withall so wretched that 'tis not worthwhile to be, if we were to die as the beasts! What mortal would sustain the pains, the wants, the disappointments, the cares, and thousands of calamities we must often suffer here? But when we consider this as a probationary state, wherein we are placed by the Supreme Being, and that, if we wisely behave ourselves here, if we purify our souls from all corrupt and inordinate affections, if we can, by the divine assistance, recover the image of God [moral goodness]? which we lost in Adam and attain to a heavenly temper and disposition of mind, full of the love of God, etc., then we justly think that even this life is an effect of the inconceivable goodness of God towards us, especially since we know that all things shall work together for good to those that love God,* and that these light afflictions, which are but for a moment, shall be recompensed with an exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

I am almost afraid that I should tire you with-such frequent repetitions of the same things, but "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." ° I've such a vast inexpressible desire of your salvation and such dreadful apprehensions of your failing in a work of so great importance, and do moreover know by experience how hard a thing it is to be a Christian, that I cannot forbear, I cannot but most earnestly press you and conjure you over and over again to give the most earnest heed to what you have already learned, lest at any time you let slip the remembrance of your final happiness or forget what you have to do in order to attain it!

Sammy! Believe me! The flesh, the world and the devil,® are very formidable enemies! But above all the flesh (by which, I think, is meant all our corrupt sensual appetites) is the most to be apprehended! That man of sin, the old Adam, still lives in us, and it is by ourselves we are still betrayed. Not all the pomps and vanities of the world, nor all the united powers of hell could prevail so far as to make us swerve in the least from our duty, did not these sordid, impure desires of our own given 'em the advantage they gain over us! This is the enemy that will to the last maintain a conflict! Which will sometimes be very difficult, and 'twill require our utmost skill and strength to come off conquerors, which yet would be impossible without the grace of God! You may perhaps in the course of your duty meet with those trials which our Saviour expresses by pulling out a right eye and cutting off a right hand, and you have great reason to pray daily that God would proportion your strength to your trials and that his grace may be sufficient for you.' I say not these things to discourage you, but to quicken you, to impress on your mind a greater sense of the necessity you lie under to use your utmost endeavour to get a stock of virtue, that you may not have grace to seek, when you have it to use.®

Dear child! Remember how short and how uncertain this life is! And what depends upon it! Make a stand! Recollect your thoughts! Think again upon eternity!

An endless duration! A perpetual now! That admits of no parts, succession or alteration! Of what vast importance is it, since our souls must, whether we will or no, be immortal! Of what vast importance, I say, is it, that we should be possessed of those divine virtues that will necessarily make them eternally happy!

More Letters to "Dear Sammy"

I have a great and vast desire that all your sisters and your brother" should be saved, as well as you, but I must own I think my concern for you is much the greatest. What! You, my son! You! who was once the son of my extremest sorrow in your birth and in your infancy! Who is now the son of my tenderest love! My friend in whom is my inexpressible delight! My future hope of happiness in the world! For whom I weep and pray in my retirements from the world, when no mortal knows the agonies of my soul upon your account! No eye sees my tears which are only beheld by that Father of Spirits, of whom I so importunately beg grace for you that I hope I may at last be heard! Is it possible that you should be damned! Oh! That it were impossible! Indeed, I think I could almost wish my self accursed, so I were sure of your salvation! But still I hope—still I would fain persuade myself that a child for whom so many prayers have been offered to heaven will not at last miscarry!

To the protection of the ever-blessed God I commit you. Humbly beseeching him to conduct you by his grace to his eternal glory.

Epworth March 18 Susanna Wesley M1706/7 To Samuel Wesley Jr.

7 May 1707 MA; SWJr Letter Book, pp. 75-76.

Dear Sammy!

Though I writ so lately, yet having received advice that your election is so much sooner than I expected, I take this opportunity to advise you about it.'°

The eternal ever-blessed God that at first created all things by his almighty power and that does whatever please him, as well among the inhabitants of the earth as in the armies of heaven, you know is the only disposer of all events; and therefore I would by all means persuade you solemnly to set apart some portion of time (in the Sabbath, if you can) to beg his more especial direction and assistance upon a business on which a great part of your future prosperity may depend.

I would have you in the first place humbly to acknowledge and bewail'' all the errors of your past life, as far as you can remember them; and for those that have escaped your memory, pray as David did that God would cleanse you from your secret faults. '"

Then proceed to praise him for all the mercies which you can remember you have received from his divine goodness; and then go on to beg his favour in this great affair, and do all this in the name and through the mediation of the blessed

Jesus.

Sammy, don't deceive yourself. Man is not to be depended on. God is all in all.

Those whom he blesses shall be blest indeed! When you have done this, entirely resign yourself and all your fortunes to the almighty God, nor be too careful about your being elected nor troubled if disappointed.

If you can possibly, set apart the hours of Sunday in the afternoon from four to

56 __ Letters six for this employment, which time I have also determined to the same work. May that infinite Being, whose we are and whom I hope we endeavour to serve and love, accept and bless us.

Epworth May. 7.

Susanna Wesley To Samuel Wesley Jr.

20 August 1707 MA; SW)Jr Letter Book, p. 77.

Written after Samuel's election to a scholarship. He was still at Westminster, though now with higher status and additional duties. Samuel notes in his letter book, "The following letters were sent to me since my admittance into the Colledge."

Dear Sammy!

Prithee how do you do in the midst of so much company and business to preserve your mind in any temper fit for the service of God? I'm sadly afraid lest you should neglect your duty towards him! Take care of the world, lest it unawares steal away your heart and so make your prove false to those vows and obligations which you have laid upon yourself in the covenant you personally made with the everblessed Trinity before your reception of the Holy Communion.

Have you ever received the Sacrament at London? If not, consider what has been the cause of your neglect, and embrace the next opportunity.

Epworth Aug. 20.

Susanna Wesley To Samuel Wesley Jr.

10 October 1707 MA; SWJr Letter Book, pp. 78-79.

Dear Sammy!

Since it has now pleased God to afflict you with bodily pains, 'tis a very proper season to recollect your past life to the end you may discover whether or no there be not some secret cause of his displeasure. "For he does not afflict willingly or grieve the children of men" '* without reason.

Particularly, consider whether you have been mindful of your sacramental vows and obligations. Assure yourself if you have not, if still the divine Goodness continues his merciful intentions towards you, he will punish you for your neglect.

I know physicians are apt to say that rheumatic distempers carry no danger of death in them, but I'm of opinion that all diseases whatever, if God sees we unworthily abuse his mercies and that we shall continue to trifle away our time here, which is our only opportunity of working out our salvation, and may certainly put a period to our days, as well those called chronical as the most acute.

More Letters to "Dear Sammy"

Nor are you too young to think of dying or to prepare for that eternal duration which succeeds this transitory uncertain life!

May the God of mercies give you grace to remember your Creator in the days of your youth!'* And may his Holy Spirit preserve you from the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil! !° Epworth. Oct 10

Susanna Wesley To Samuel Wesley Jr.

27 November 1707 MA; SW)Jr Letter Book, pp. 79-96.

Dear Sammy!

We both complain of not having often heard from each other. What foundation there is for complaint on your side I know not, but I'm apt to suspect you've written more letters to me than I've received. For you lately sent one that never came to my hands, though I was advertised of some part of the contents of it, as of your having received the Sacrament, at which I'm greatly pleased; and that you desire some direction how to resist temptations, and some particular advice how to prepare for the reception of the blessed Communion.

You never informed me of any particular temptation to which you are exposed, and 'tis impossible from dark hints and general expressions to collect the true state of your case. Therefore, I can but offer at general things and if I happen to omit anything that I should chiefly insist on, I can't help it.

I think all temptations of what kind soever may be comprehended under these two general heads: first, the pleasure which is found in indulging the irregular motions of the mind or the gratification of the sensual appetite; or the pain, difficulty or danger which we do suppose we shall meet with in our entrance upon, or perseverance in, a course of virtue. And both these kinds of temptations are to ' be conquered by very different ways.

If you have ever made any serious reflections on the state of your own soul, you must know that human nature is fallen from its primitive innocence. The everblessed God, which needed not the service or assistance of any creature, his essential perfections being fully sufficient for his own eternal blessedness, did out of a principle of pure goodness create angels and men, that he might communicate that perfection and happiness, which in himself were incapable of any accession.'" Man, therefore, taking his original from the divine nature, must necessarily in the state of his first creation have been most perfect, since nothing evil could possibly proceed from infinite goodness; nor could evil any way have entered into the world but by man being left to his own liberty. And if he had not been left to his own liberty, but had God made him a necessary and not a free agent, the divine glory had been apparently diminished and the virtue of man's obedience utterly destroyed and had been rendered incapable of any reward. Liberty in man being the foundation of rewards and punishments, as well as of moral virtue.

S58 Letters I need not enlarge upon the present corrupt state of human nature. The Scripture account of Adam's fall is very clear and every way agreeable to the reason and experience of any that will give themselves leave to think. How Adams sin hath been transmitted to all his posterity we do not well know, but we are sure the fact is true, and therefore I would have you take some pains to get a clear knowledge and deep sense of the corruption of your nature. For the better you are acquainted with your disease, the better you may apply a remedy.

The disease of the understanding is in general that ignorance which proceeds from an indisposition to know the truth. But as the goodness of any object is what we ought principally to regard, so clearly to perceive the truth concerning what is good or evil is the chief business of the understanding. And its averseness from that kind of knowledge and contemplation is the greatest corruption.

Knowledge hath been distinguished into immediate and mediate. The former is when the being, qualities, etc. of anything, or truth of any proposition is known by its own proper evidence, which is called self-evident truth. As that fire is hot, ice cold, etc. or that a part of anything is less than the whole, etc. Mediate knowledge is when the being, qualities, etc. of a thing or truth of a proposition is known by the intervention of some other thing, whose clearer evidence affords us light to discern it; and when we thus proceed from the evidence of one thing to argue and infer another, this is what we call argument or discourse, and this kind of knowledge is properly scientifical.

When the medium of our knowledge is the testimony of any person, 'tis called belief or faith, which Bishop Pearson well defines, "An assent to anything credible as credible," '® in which you may observe that credibility is the formal essence of faith, as the supposed ability and integrity of the relator is the formal essence of credibility. '"

In these cases the fault of the understanding is either a privation of the act or an indisposition to it or else a want of rectitude in the act. When we should know a thing by its proper evidence, the privation of the act is ignorance, and the privation of its rectitude is error, which differ as not judging at all or judging falsely. When it should know by testimony, the privation of the act is unbelief, and the privation of the rectitude is either disbelief, when we without sufficient reason think the reporter erreth or would deceive us, or misbelief, when we believe a testimony which we ought not to believe. So you see, the diseases of the understanding are in general ignorance, error, unbelief, misbelief and disbelief.

The will is supposed to act in subordination to the understanding and to be determined by the judgment, since no man can will anything under the formal notion of evil. But whatever excites its motions, the corruption of it is plainly discovered by its strong tendency to sensual forbidden objects and its unreasonable aversation from God and the position of its act in relation to spiritual things.

The depravity of the memory is discerned in its retentiveness of evil and its neglect in retaining the impressions of spiritual matters.

I think that the sin of imagination or fancy consisteth in a disposition to think of evil or worldly sensual things and an unaptness to think upon what is good, and when we force ourselves to holy thoughts, they are generally disordered, confused, and unskillfully managed.

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The corruption of the passions manifestly appears in their being so easily and strongly excited by the sensitive appetite which precipitates them into such violent motions as generally cause them to err in point of excess, where their objects are sensual or evil, and in defect when the object is spiritual and good.

You may perhaps think that this long digression is nothing to the purpose, it seeming at first view very foreign to the business of temptation. But I'm of another mind, since 'tis from these corrupted faculties and appetites that Satan draws all his auxiliary forces and fights us with our own weapons. And if it were not for the impurity and treachery of that strong party within us that adhere to his interest, all the powers of hell could never prevail against ist"

You may remember I said that temptations of all kinds might be comprehended under two general heads. Your business is to take notice to what kind of temptation you lie most exposed and what it is that most usually prevails over you.

If your temptations are of a spiritual nature, and you find that the devil takes advantage from your ignorance and natural indisposition to think on spiritual things to tempt you to a great aversion from God, and a total neglect of what you know is your duty towards him, as praise, prayer etc. or else suggests vain, sinful or unnecessary thoughts in the performance, which corrupts the purity of the sacrifices and renders them altogether ineffectual. And you likewise perceive that he takes advantage from the defection of your will, corrupt imagination and irregular passions, etc. to represent religion to your mind as a melancholy thing, and that 'tis a matter of great difficulty to serve God, and next to impossible to reduce a mind so totally depraved to order and a universal obedience to the law of God. And these thoughts dishearten you, either from making any attempt or else so far indispose your mind that you move faintly and unwillingly and so make no progress in the paths of virtue.

If you are assaulted by these or such like temptations, then your case is reducible under the second head and your method of conquering must be: after having humbly acknowledged your own impotence before God and earnestly implored his assistance, to resolve upon a courageous and vigorous encounter of all difficulties, which is the only way to overcome them. For if you give ground, you are lost! Whereas, by repeated acts of piety, you'll gain a facility of acting, and then you'll find that all those difficulties will vanish; and your uneasiness and aversion from duty will decrease as your mind is renewed, till at last you attain such virtuous habits as will make religion the most agreeable and delightful thing in the world.

But Satan does not usually assault the young converts with temptations of this kind, especially those whose complexion is so sanguine as yours. But he commonly makes his attacks upon the sensitive appetites, which he excites by proper objects to such strong commotions as put the whole frame of nature out of order, and drowns the voice of reason, to whose conduct and government God hath committed them. I have not time to discourse at large upon this copious subject. I shall therefore single out two instances that include many particulars. First, impurity; secondly, intemperance in meat, drink or recreation. Both of which are included in the second branch of the first general head, viz. the pleasing the sensual appetites.

And I shall here propose a general direction that I think will be of use in all such kind of temptations. Whenever the matter of any temptation is sensual pleasure, you

Letters must immediately fly from it, nor so much as suffer yourself to think upon it, till the first motions of the passions are over and the mind is reduced to such a composure as renders it capable of receiving the influences of the Holy Spirit, which you must earnestly implore, for that pure and Holy Spirit moves not in storms and tempests, nor can his small still voice*! be heard amidst the uproar of tumultuous passions. Therefore you must take special care to resist the first motions to any impurity with the utmost vigour. If they are indulged, the second will be harder to overcome, and the third more difficult than the second, and so on.

I cannot say that the first motion of the sin of impurity is always (though I believe very often) from Satan. But this I'm sure of, that whether they proceed from him or the natural constitution of the body or any other cause, that he is very careful to observe how these first motions are received and takes vast advantage from the least inclination to indulge them. Therefore, if this be your case, fly all incentives to so base and sordid a sin as you would from present death. Suffer not your eyes to look upon, nor your ears to hear, nor your tongue to speak one word that may have the least tendency towards begettirig an impure desire. If you find

Satan solicits you very strongly, cry mightily to God for assistance. If you have not opportunity for retired devotions, yet at least you may offer up some private ejaculations, which he will regard (if sincere) and answer as soon as the most enlarged petitions. At such times seriously advert to the omnipresence of God. Think or say to yourself, "I am now in the presence of the holy God who perfectly knows me and particularly regards how I behave myself in this time of trial. This is my probationary state, and the resisting of temptation is the way to Glory. And shall I presume to sin willfully, when the eternal Majesty of heaven and earth is looking upon me?" 2? Then in a full sense of his presence, cry out unto him, "Lord, help me—

Save me or I now perish?*—Suffer not the flesh or the Devil in thy presence to prevail against that soul which thou sentest thine own Son into the world to redeem—I am weak of myself, unable to do anything that is good, but I throw myself upon thy mercy—Lord, save or I perish!" ** These or such like fervent ejaculations may prove very effectual and discourage Satan from making further attempts.

But you must watch as well as pray.'? And that you may always be in a capacity so to do, remember the second instance I mentioned: intemperance in meat, drink, etc. Perhaps you'll think that the small provision made for you in the college is a sufficient guard against the first. But may there not be more danger of eating intemperately, if you are accidentally at another table? I don't know, but I think it concerns you to take care.

Nor can I tell what temptations you may meet with to immoderate drinking. But since in this licentious age few are secure, it behoves you to fortify yourself against that brutish destructive sin which generally proves an inlet to all kinds of wickedness, especially to the sin of impurity. For temperance is the peculiar guard of chastity. Nor can I see how 'tis possible for a person to resist any temptations that nature, whose blood is fired and filled with more spirits than they can command and whose reason is so weakened by the pernicious fumes of strong liquors, that it can no longer maintain its own authority. "Twill be very necessary to think often upon the true end of eating and drinking, which is to repair the decays of nature and thereby to strengthen and refresh the body, that it my be serviceable to the

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mind, as both must be to God. And whatever other end is proposed, as pleasure, company etc., are directly contrary to the will of God and the great law of nature.

And I think all the pretences men make to colour their intemperance are very good arguments against it.

The common plea of pleasure answers itself; for if the devil and corrupt nature have already gained so considerable a point as to make anyone drink for the pleasure of drinking, 'tis high time for such a one to look to himself and carefully avoid all temptations to intemperance, lest he should, ere he is aware, be engaged beyond a possibility of retreat. 1 would not have you think that I believe it a sin to be pleased with the provision God has made for us, or that I would propose my own way of living (which perhaps is too abstemious) as a rule for you to walk by. No; all I intend is that we should by no means make pleasure our principle end in eating or drinking. But whether we eat or drink or whatsoever we do, let us do all to the glory of God,*® which I'm sure the intemperate and voluptuous can never do.

The other pretence of drinking for the sake of company is more ridiculous than the former. To drink for our own pleasure carries some show of reason, but to drink to humour or comply with another man's appetite is such an unaccountable piece of nonsense that, did not frequent experience assure us of the fact, no mortal could believe a man would ever do it. Should anyone subject his body to the power of diseases and bring his soul under the wrath of God and forfeit his hopes of heaven in compliance with a foolish custom for a compliment to please those that perhaps don't care a farthing for him! 'Tis too much, God knows, to be so often conquered by our own appetites, but 'tis a thousand times worse more inexcusable to be enslaved by another man's! Nor should it ever be in anyone's power to say they had such an ascendant over me, that they could either flatter or force me to drink one glass beyond what I thought necessary for my health or refreshment!

But there is another thing that often prevails more with young inexperienced persons than either flattery or force. And that is a fear of being thought singular and precise and that they shall be laughed at if they refuse to do like the rest of the company. To this I shall only say, remember what you are, a Christian, the disciple of a crucified Jesus—and he has commanded that all his disciples should take up the cross and follow him. Consider how "he made himself of no reputation," but " 27 and therefore how little reason have you to "was despised and rejected of men, regard the unjust censures of a mistaken world or being made the subject of a little raillery because you will not be ashamed of or deny your Master? And be assured that though they laugh now, you will have infinitely more reason to rejoice, if by the grace of God you can preserve your innocence. Alas, you don't know the world.

If you did, you'd plainly see that there's no passing through it without meeting with many reproaches and reflections and often very hard usage from such as will take it very ill if you don't think 'em very good Christians. And then what wonder is it if you are affronted and reviled or laughed at by the licentious part of mankind, who will be sure to be highly displeased if you "run not with them into the same excess of riot"?** But after all, consider what they are which are against you, and who they are that are on your side. All good men will esteem you and have a certain veneration for you when they see your mind superior to those temptations that prevail over

Letters others, and that the sincerity of your piety is evidenced by your constant temperance and sobriety. The holy angels that are employed about you will rejoice over you, their charge, and gladly minister to you in your spiritual warfare.*? You will be an inexpressible comfort to your parents in their declining years, who will think the care, trouble and hardship they have undergone for you well rewarded, if after all they see that you are truly devoted to the service of God. And what is infinitely more than all this, your blessed Saviour will in the end vouchsafe you his plaudit and pronounce that most joyful sentence before all the world, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!" *°

The last instance of temperance in recreation I shall say little to. I don't know what time is assigned you for it, and I think your health and studies require you should use a pretty deal of exercise. You best know whether your heart be too much set upon it. If it be, I'll tell you what rule I observed in the same case, when I was young and too much addicted to childish diversions, which was this: never to spend more time in any matter of mere recreation in one day than I spent in private religious duties. I leave it to your consideration whether this is practicable by you or no. I think it is.

I am so ill and have with so much pain writ this long letter, that I gladly hasten to a conclusion and shall leave your request about the Sacrament unanswered till I hear from you, and then, if I am in a condition to write, I'll gladly assist you as well as I can. May God of his infinite mercy direct you in all things.

Epworth. Nov. 27

Susanna Wesley Notes Ta pee 1 Kings 750.

2. The elder Wesley was arrested for debt (at the hands of political enemies among his parishioners) and spent several months of 1705 in Lincoln Castle. Apparently, the victim of drink in S. W's grisly story was one of his persecutors.

3. Brackets in MS.

. Close paraphrase of Romans 8:28.

. Matthew 12:34; quotation marks added.

. BCP, Litany.

. See Matthew 5:29-30 and 2 Corinthians 12:9.

. Possibly a somewhat garbled aphorism. oN DN ON +f 9. Four-year-old John. The third and last son, Charles, was not born until 29 December

1707, and the last surviving daughter, Kezia, was born in March 1709.

10. Probably his election as a King's Scholar at Westminster School. See Adam Clarke,

Wesley Family; Collected Principally from Original Documents (New Youk: N. Bangs and T. Mason for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1824), p. 293; and George Stevenson, Memorials of the Wesley

Family .

. (London: S. W. Partridge; New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), p. 233.

11. BCP communion service, confession.

12. Paraphrase of Psalm 19:12.

13. Lamentations 3:33; quotation marks added.

14. See Ecclesiastes 12:1.

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15. BCP, Litany.

16. "Must" written here above the line.

17. Addition, augmentation, increase.

18. John Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed, 6th ed. (London: J. Williams, 1692), p. 2: direct quote; my quotation marks. The MS begins the quotation with a dash. Pearson begins the paragraph, "Belief in general I define to be.

." Pearson (1613-1686), bishop of Chester from 1673, was a royalist and a scholar. ies Ibid., p. 5: "Whereas if it be any matter of concernment in which the interest of him that relateth or affirmeth any thing to us is considerable, there it is not the skill or knowledge of the Relater which will satisfie us, except we have as strong an opinion of his fidelity and integrity.

." S. W. has here quickly summarized several pages of the bishop's dense prose.

20. Echoes of Matthew 16:18.

Dayesee dikings 19:12.

22. Quotation marks added.

23. See Matthew 8:25.

24. Quotation marks added.

25. Matthew 26:41: "Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation."

26. Paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 10:31.

27. A combination of Philippians 2:7 and Isaiah 53:3; quotation marks added.

28. 1 Peter 4:4; quotation marks added, question mark added.

29. As they ministered to Jesus in his temptation. See Matthew 4:1—11.

30. Nearly exact quotation of Matthew 25:21; quotation marks added.

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