Such were some of the illustrious men flourishing at this period. We shall meet with others farther on.
Mr Wesley’s first ecclesiastical appointment was a curacy, with an income of £28 a-year. He was then appointed chaplain on board a man-of-war, where his salary was at the rate of £70 a-year, and where he began his poem on the Life of Christ. He then obtained another curacy in London, his ecclesiastical income during the two years’ service that he rendered, being £30 per annum, an amount which he doubled by his industry and writings. It was while he held this appointment that he married, he and his wife living in lodgings, until after the birth of their first-born, Samuel.
The young lady, who became Mr Wesley’s wife, was Susanna Annesley, the daughter of Dr Annesley, one of the leading Nonconformist ministers of London.
Dr Annesley was born at Haseley in Warwickshire, in the year 1620. His father was cousin of the Earl of Anglesea, and died when Samuel was but four years of age. His education devolved on his pious mother, who brought him up in the fear of God. From his early childhood his heart was set on preaching; and, to qualify himself for that sacred work, he began, when he was only five or six years old, seriously to read the Bible; and such was his ardour that he bound himself to read twenty chapters daily, a practice which he continued to the end of life. Though a child, he never varied from his purpose to become a preacher; nor was he discouraged by a dream, in which “he thought he was a minister, and was sent for by the Bishop of London to be burnt as a martyr.” At fifteen years of age, he went to Queen’s College, Oxford, and there took the degree of LL.D. When he was twenty-four he became chaplain of his Majesty’s ship Globe, under the command of the Earl of Warwick. Not liking a seafaring life, he left the navy, and settled at Cliff in Kent, in the place of a minister who had been sequestered for his scandalous living; but of whom the rude and ignorant parishioners were so extremely fond, that when Annesley, his successor, first went among them, they assailed him with spits, forks, and stones, threatening to take away his life. In a few years his labours had surprising success, and the people were greatly reformed.
In July 1648, he was called to London to preach the fast sermon before the House of Commons, which, by imperial order, was printed. In 1652, he relinquished his living at Cliff, which was worth £400 a year, and became minister of the Church of St John the Apostle in London. Five years after he was made lecturer at St Paul’s, and, in 1658, became vicar and “soul-servant,” as he terms himself, of St Giles’s, Cripplegate. He now had two of the largest congregations in the city. The Cripplegate living was worth £700 per annum.
With two thousand other ministers he was ejected by the Act of Uniformity, and had his fair share of subsequent persecution. One magistrate, while signing a warrant to apprehend him, dropped down dead.
Samuel Annesley was a large-hearted man, and was extensively useful. He had the care of all the Nonconformist churches in the capital upon him; and was the chief instrument in the education and subsistence of several ministers, of whose useful labours the church would otherwise have been deprived.
In 1672, when King Charles, for the sake of the Papists, unconstitutionally suspended for a little while the penal laws in matters of religion, Dr Annesley licensed a meeting-house in St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate Street, where he raised a large and flourishing church, of which he continued the pastor until his death. He was the main support of the morning lecture, and always laid aside a tenth part of his income for charitable purposes. He had a weekly meeting of ministers in his vestry at St Helen’s Place; and, once a month, there were Latin disputations upon theology; but, as these engendered heated debates among the ministers, they were dropped. In the same meeting-house at St Helen’s Place, Edmund Calamy was ordained in 1694, his being the first public ordination among the Dissenters for more than thirty years. Dr Annesley and five other ministers took part in the ordination service, which lasted nearly nine hours, from before ten o’clock in the morning to past six o’clock at night. During the last thirty years of his life he had uninterrupted peace of spirit, arising from an uninterrupted assurance of God’s forgiving love. He closed his useful ministry, of more than fifty-five years’ continuance, December 31st, 1696. His death occurred in Spittal Yard, and he lies interred in the burial-ground of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch. His funeral sermon was preached by the Rev. Daniel Williams, and, in an enlarged form, was published by Dunton in 1697, making a small volume of one hundred and fifty pages. Williams states in the biography, that Annesley was of so hale and hardy a constitution, as to endure the coldest weather without using hat, gloves, or fire. For many years he seldom drank anything but water, and, to the day of his death, he could read the smallest print without spectacles. He was an eminently useful man, and, in most things, a pattern worthy of imitation. A short time before he died his joy was such that he exclaimed, “I cannot contain it. What manner of love is this to a poor worm! I cannot express the thousandth part of the praise due to Christ. I’ll praise Thee, and rejoice that there are others that can praise Thee better!”
The celebrated Richard Baxter, who was no eulogist, remarks:—“Dr Annesley is a most sincere, godly, humble man,—an Israelite indeed: one that may be said to be sanctified from the womb.” Dunton, his son-in-law, says—“He was a man of wonderful piety and humility. The great business and the pleasure of his life was to persuade sinners back to God. His Nonconformity created him many troubles; but they never altered the goodness and cheerfulness of his humour.” Daniel Defoe was one of his congregation, and wrote an elegy respecting him, which Dunton published. Defoe, speaking of his early piety, says:—
“His pious course with childhood he began,