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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
Samuel Wesley , rector of Epworth , was a renegade Whig and Dissenter , who in early life took suddenly , and on paltry pretences , to abusing his former principles and companions , and then settled down into a regular high church and Tory priest for the rest of his days . He was an austere man ; cold , stately , precise ,
dogmatical ; his expectations disappointed , his temper soured , and his pride mortified , by the narrowness of his pecuniary means , and the continually impending embarrassment of his circumstances ; he wrote long commentaries on the book of Job ; he believed that his house was haunted by a supernatural visitant ; and 4 he considered his parishioners as a flock over which the Holy Ghost had made him overseer , and for which he must render an
account ; he visited them from house to house ; he sifted their creed , and suffered none to be corrupt in opinion , or practice , without instruction or reproof . ' He was , in short , as Dr . Adam Clarke says , and Mr . Dove says after him , * strictly correct . ' He was a most highly respectable man ; he ought to have been more , he should have been a dean at least ; and really conscientious and pious , according to the standard which then obtained in his party , and indeed in the country generally .
Mrs . Wesley , the mother of Hetty , was the feminine of her husband ; or rather , perhaps , would have been the exact female counterpart of a being who stood individually higher in the same species . She was better in proportion , but with no essential superiority . ' Before she was thirteen years of age she examined
the whole controversy between the Established Church and the Dissenters . ' Only think of that ! * She bore nineteen children to Mr . Wesley / and educated fifteen , besides attending to ' the tithes and glebe , " * &c . all ' by herself ; and as she was a woman £ bat lived by rule , she arranged every thing so exactly that for each operation she had sufficient time . ' Well might Mr , Dove
adopt the dictum of Dr . Adam Clarke for his motto , ' Such a family I have never read of , heard of , or known ; nor since the days of Abraham and Sarah , and Joseph and Mary of Nazareth , has there ever been a family to which the human race has been more indebted . '
Under such auspices was the gentle , fragile , playful , lovely , loving , and sensitive Mehetabel Wesley ushered into the world . She sprang up like the chance seedling of a delicate acacia between the cold hard pebbles of a well-rolled gravel walk , in a square bedded garden , with its formal box and thorny fence , there to be trained , nailed up , and crucified to an iron frame , or a varnished brick-wall , and be tortured , chilled , and wither ; beautiful even in her drooping and her death . Her first calamity was what
there are too many who would still regard as the best of all possible educations . The industrious Mrs . Wesley , the paragon of moral mud religious mothers , was soon hard at work upon her . Tbe pbmBJporsued are minutely detailed in a . letter from the good
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I ( M A Victim .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1833, page 166, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2610/page/22/
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