Another epoch in the girlhood of this remarkable young lady was the engagement, somewhat previously, of her mind in the controversy between the Church and Nonconformity.  Here she had ample opportunity of being well-informed, for her father’s house was the resort of many able men on both sides of the question.  The result was that, with all due respect toward her beloved parent, she, renounced his ecclesiastical views and attached herself to the Established Church.  “I was educated among the Dissenters,” she writes, “and because there was something remarkable in my leaving them at so early an age, not being full thirteen, I had drawn up an account of the whole transaction, under which I had included the main of the controversy between them and the Established Church as far as it had come to my knowledge.”  Clearly, Susanna Wesley is not to be considered as having merely accepted the ecclesiastical situation, turning “Churchwoman” by marriage.

III.

MARRIAGE.

Dr. Annesley’s daughters were remarkable for their personal beauty, and from all accounts it would seem that the subject of this narrative shared this “dower.”  She was of average stature and slight frame.

“Some time, late in 1689 or early in 1690,” Susanna Annesley was married to Samuel Wesley.  Mr. Wesley was at that time a curate at a salary of L30 a year, and with his newly-wedded wife, took lodgings in London till the autumn of 1690, when he received the living of South Ormsby, in Lincolnshire, through the presentation of the Marquis of Normanby.

While exercising, in his pastoral duties, a diligence and faithfulness such as to put him for the most part above censure, the young husband toiled hard in literary work for the support of his household, and by various publications of a theological character in verse and prose—­at one time a metrical Life of Christ, at another a treatise on The Hebrew Points, and chiefly by articles in Dunton’s Athenian Oracle—­he earned the means of keeping his family at least above distress.

About the close of 1696 Samuel Wesley was presented to the parish of Epworth—­a place destined to be irrevocably associated with his name.  This promotion is said to have been awarded him by special desire of the Queen, to whom he had dedicated his Metrical and Illustrated Life of Christ.

IV.

EPWORTH.

Mr. and Mrs. Wesley, with their family of four children—­one son and three daughters, the youngest of these being an infant in arms—­duly took possession of their new sphere.  The promotion proved to be a hard parish and a humble abode.  The landowners were comparatively poor, and of small culture in mind or morals.  The people were proportionately subject to hardships in their mode of life, and were rude and even “savage” in character, as events were soon to prove.