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THE KING’S BUSINESS
the 10th day o f February; the next day he began to learn, and as soon as he knew the letters, began at the first chapter of Genesis. He was taught to spell the first verse, then to read it over and over until he could read it off-hand without any hes itation ; and so on to the second, &c, till he took ten verses for a lesson, which he quickly did. Easter fell low that year, and by Whitsuntide he could read a chapter very well, for he read continually, and had such a prodigious memory that I cannot remember ever to have told him the same word twice- What was stranger, any word he had learnt in his lesson he knew wher ever he saw it, either in his Bible or any other book, by which means he learned very soon to read an English author well.” THE MOTHER’ S CAPAB ILITY Her energetic and decided conduct, as wife o f a parish clergyman, is strikingly illustrated by a correspondence still extant between herself and her husband on a curious occasion. It appears that during Mr. Wesley’s long-protracted absences from home in attending Convocation, Mrs. Wesley, dissatisfied with the state o f things at Epworth, began the habit o f gathering a few parishoners at the rectory on Sunday evenings and reading to them. As might naturally have been expected, the attend ance soon became so large that her husband took alarm at the report he heard, and made some objections to the practice. The letters o f Mrs. Wesley on this occasion are a model o f strong, hard-headed, Chris tian good sense, and deserve the perusal o f many timid believers in the present' day. After defending what she had done by many wise and unanswerable arguments, and beseeching her husband to consider seriously the bad consequences o f stopping the meetings, she winds up all with the fol lowing remarkable paragraph: “I f you do, after all, think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me that you desire me to do it, for that1will not satisfy my conscience. But send me your positive command in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and pun-
good terms with his parishoners, and, poor as he was, insisted on going up to London every year to attend the unprofitable meet ings o f Convocation for months at a time, the reader will probably agree with me that, like too many, he was a man o f more book-learning and cleverness than good sense. The mother o f John Wesley was evi dently a woman o f extraordinary power of mind. She was the daughter o f Dr. Annes- ley, a man well known to readers o f Puri tan theology as one o f the chief promoters o f the-Morning Exercises, and ejected from St. Giles, Cripplegate, in 1662. From him she seems to have inherited the masculine sense and strong, decided judgment which distinguished her character. To the influ ence o f his mother’s early training and example, John Wesley, doubtless, was indebted for many o f his peculiar habits o f mind and qualifications. Her own account o f the way in which she educated all her children, in one o f her letters to her son John, is enough to show that she was no common woman, and that her sons were not likely to turn out common men. She says: “ None o f them was taught to read till five years old, except Keziah, in whose case I was overruled; and she was more years in learning than any o f the rest had been months. The way o f teaching was this: the day before a child began to learn, the house was set in order, every one’s work appointed them, and a charge given that none should come into the room from nine to twelve, or from two to five, which were our school hours. One day was allowed the child wherein to learn its let ters, and each o f them did in that time know all its letters, great and small, except Molly and Nancy, who were a day and a half before they knew them perfectly, for which I then thought them very dull; but the reason why I thought them so was because the rest learned to readily, and your brother Samuel, who was the first child I ever taught, learnt the alphabet in a few hours. He was five years old on
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