II. THE HOME OF THE WESLEYS
With the Wesleys perhaps the strongest influence was that of the family and the home. Their grandfather, John Wesley, was a Nonconformist clergyman, and, what is more to the point, a poet. Their father, Samuel Wesley, was quite a voluminous poet (sixteen volumes), owing his Epworth rectorship to Queen Mary’s approval of his Life of Christ, an Heroic Poem. One of his hymns, “Behold the Saviour of mankind,” still appears in some of our current hymnals.
Their maternal grandfather was Rev. Samuel Annesley, LL.D., a scholarly Nonconformist clergyman. Their mother, Susanna Annesley, is recognized as a woman of extraordinary force of character, organizing ability, and intense piety, the “Mother of Methodism,” and even more gifted than her gifted but less steady and dependable husband. It will be noted that both grandfathers were dissenting clergymen.
The Epworth rectory life was intellectual, intensely devout, and full of the singing of psalms and hymns, for it was “a nest of singing birds.” When students at Oxford, John and Charles used to walk out into the meadows and sing songs and hymns together.[1]