Rarely abroad, or never, but with me,

Or when by pity called, or charity.”

Such was the nuptial life of Samuel and Susanna Wesley. They were married about the year 1689, but where and by whom there is no evidence to show. For about forty-six years they bravely battled with their domestic trials, and, after a seven years’ separation, were, in 1742, reunited in that happy world, where “the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” “No man,” says Southey, “was ever more suitably mated than Samuel Wesley. The wife whom he chose was, like himself, the child of a man eminent among the Nonconformists, and, like himself, in early life she had chosen her own path. She had examined the controversy between the Dissenters and the Church of England with conscientious diligence, and satisfied herself that the schismatics were in the wrong. She had reasoned herself into Socinianism, from which her husband reclaimed her. She was an admirable woman, an obedient wife, an exemplary mother, and a fervent Christian. The marriage was blest in all its circumstances; it was contracted in the prime of their youth; it was fruitful and death did not divide them till they were full of days.”

[The facts contained in this chapter have been gathered from Clarke’s Wesley Family; Dunton’s Life and Errors; Defoe’s Works; Knight’s History of England; Baxter’s Life and Times; Calamy’s Nonconformist Memorials; Calamy’s Life and Times; Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion; Williams’s Funeral Sermon for Annesley; Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary; John White’s Speech in the House of Commons in 1641; John White’s Century of Scandalous Priests, &c., &c.]

CHAPTER VII.
THE “ATHENIAN GAZETTE.”—1690–1695.

In 1691 or thereabouts, Mr Wesley was appointed to the parish of South Ormsby, a neat Lincolnshire village, about eight miles north-west of Spilsby. It is pleasantly situated, and, in 1821, the parish, including the adjoining hamlet of Kettlesby, contained thirty-six dwelling-houses, and two hundred and sixty-one inhabitants, a population probably quite equal to what it was in the days of Samuel Wesley. The church consists of a tower, a nave, and a chancel, with a small chapel on the northern side, and is dedicated to St Leonard.[[39]]

This was no serious charge for a young clergyman of twenty-eight years of age, and possessed of learning and ability like those of Samuel Wesley; yet here, among his flock of two hundred men, women, and children, he resided and faithfully laboured for about the next five years. The living was obtained for him without any solicitation on his part, by the Marquis of Normanby. Its emoluments were £50 a year, and a house to live in.[[40]] The house was little better than a mud-built hut, and Samuel Wesley in describing it and his own life in it, writes:—

“In a mean cot, composed of reeds and clay,

Wasting in sighs the uncomfortable day;

Near where the inhospitable Humber roars,