We may well imagine that Jonas, with his “strong sense of religion,” was one of that earnest band of “several hundreds of plain people” who listened, spellbound, to the eloquence of John Wesley on that memorable day of May 1742, on which, on Birstall Hill, began the great Yorkshire “Revival.” Of his wife, “a woman of exemplary piety,” the mother of the future philosopher, little has been recorded beyond the fragmentary notice in her son’s autobiography. He says of her:— “It is but little that I can recollect of my mother. I remember, however, that she was careful to teach me the Assembly’s Catechism, and to give me the best instructions the little time that I was at home. Once in particular, when I was playing with a pin, she asked me where I got it; and on telling her that I found it at my uncle’s, who lived very near to my father, and where I had been playing with my cousins, she made me carry it back again; no doubt to impress my mind, as it could not fail to do, with a clear idea of the distinction of property and of the importance of attending to it. She died in the hard winter of 1739,[3] not long after being delivered of my youngest brother; and having dreamed a little before her death that she was in a delightful place, which she particularly described and imagined to be heaven, the last words which she spake, as my aunt informed me, were, ‘Let me go to that fine place.’” During some considerable portion of his mother’s short period of married life, Joseph Priestley, together with his brother Timothy, was committed to the care of his grandfather Swift, with whom he remained with little interruption until his mother’s death. From this we may infer that the domestic circumstances of his parents were far from easy, or that the accommodation at Fieldhead was unequal to the support of the cloth-dresser’s rapidly-increasing family. Timothy, who, after following his father’s business as a cloth-dresser for a time, became an Independent minister, and died in London, has left us reminiscences of his brother’s boyhood. He seems to have been particularly impressed with his ability to repeat the Assembly’s Catechism “without missing a word,” and by being made to kneel down with him while he prayed. “This was not at bed-time, which he never neglected, but in the course of the day.” On the death of his mother, the eldest boy, then barely six years old, was taken home and sent to school in the neighbourhood. Luckily for him, his Aunt Sarah, Mrs Keighley, “a truly pious and excellent woman, who knew no other use of wealth, or of talents of any kind, than to do good, and who never spared herself for this purpose,” being childless, offered, in 1742, to relieve her brother Jonas of all care for his eldest son by taking entire charge of him. “From this time,” says her nephew, “she was truly a parent to me, till her death in 1764.”