OF
MRS. SUSANNA WESLEY,
YOUNGEST AND LAST SURVIVING DAUGHTER OF
DR. SAMUEL ANNESLEY.

In sure and stedfast hope to rise,
And claim her mansion in the skies,
A Christian hero her flesh laid down,
The cross exchanging for a crown;

True daughter of affection she,
Inured to pain and misery;
Mourned a long night of grief and fears--
A legal night of seventy years.

The Father then revealed His Son;
Him in the broken bread made known
She knew, and felt her sins forgiven,
And found the earnest of her heaven.

Meet for the fellowship above,
She heard the call, "Arise, My love!"
"I come," her dying looks replied,
And lamb-like, as her Lord, she died.

XIII.

CONCLUSION.

The title "Founder of Methodism," humanly speaking, must be shared
between mother and son. To many minds this will seem to have been a
question settled by the action of Mrs. Wesley at Epworth.

But her part in the matter shows a deepening beauty from the first in
fulfilment of the words of her Journal concerning John, with special
reference to his remarkable rescue from the fire, "I do intend to be
more particularly careful of the soul of this child, that Thou hast so
mercifully provided for."

When, at college, he and his brother, with their young companions,
owing to their living by rule, first won the name of "Methodists," amid
sneers and persecutions, his mother cheered him on. At that juncture,
subsequently, when he was in a state of hesitancy as to entering the
holy ministry, and his father had encouraged the idea of delay, his
mother said, "The sooner you are a deacon the better"--and broke the
spell of what might have been a fatal backwardness. On that evening, at
Aldersgate Street, 24th May, 1738, so memorable in the spiritual history
of Methodism, when John Wesley stood up in his newly-found fulness of
the assurance of grace, and encountered much sharp rebuke on the spot,
he had been well fortified beforehand with his mother's sympathy,
saying, "She was glad he had got into such a just way of thinking." She
also saw eye to eye with him in his position in the controversy between
Calvinism and Arminianism.

The beginning of lay-preaching dates, as we have seen, from her support
of Thomas Maxfield, and the leading features of the mode of preaching
which John Wesley recommended to his followers may be found, long