MEMOIRS.

MRS. SUSANNA WESLEY.

MISS SUSANNA ANNESLEY, afterwards Susanna Wesley, was the youngest daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley, already mentioned. She was born on the 20th of January, in the year 1669 or 1670. She was endowed with a fine natural understanding, which was advanced to a very high pitch of perfection by an education at once religious and literary. A mind such as hers, nurtured under the roof and parental cares of Dr. Annesley, had the highest advantages, and must have greatly profited by them. Though her father was a conscientious Nonconformist, he had too much dignity of mind, leaving his religion out of the question, to be a bigot. Under the parental roof, and before she was thirteen years of age, she examined without restraint the whole controversy between the established church and the dissenters. The issue of which was, she renounced her religious fellowship with the latter, and adopted the creed and forms of the Church of England; to which she faithfully and zealously adhered as long as she lived. It does not appear that her father threw any obstacles in her way, or that he afterwards disapproved of her marrying a rigid orthodox churchman; who, from a similar process, became a convert from the peculiar tenets of his