JOHN WESLEY was born at Epworth, in the county of Lincoln, on the 17th of June, 1703,[5] and was the son of Samuel and Susannah Wesley, the former being the learned, laborious, and godly rector of the Epworth parish from about the year 1696 to his death in 1735. The Wesley family consisted of nineteen children, but, of these, nine died in infancy. The name of one of the dead infants was John, and the name of another Benjamin; and when the subject of this biography was born, his mother united the two names by calling him John Benjamin. Second names are of little use, and are often troublesome, and probably for this reason Wesley’s second name was one which he never used.[6] When Wesley was born, Queen Anne was commencing the twelve years of English sovereignty which some have regarded as the Augustan age of English learning. War was raging on the continent, and, at home, an embittered fight was being fought between fiery Churchmen and fierce Dissenters. Anne warmly favoured the high church party; and to augment Church livings, gave out of the royal income “the first-fruits and the tenths,” amounting to £16,000 a year. While Wesley was yet an infant, the Whigs raised the cry of “the Church in danger,” but Parliament passed a resolution that the cry was unfounded, and that those who gave it birth were enemies to the queen, the Church, and the kingdom. Five years after this, Dr. Sacheverell preached his firebrand sermon in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and threw the nation into a state of unparalleled excitement, the ultimate result of which was, the Tories became more powerful than ever; and Queen Anne, in meeting her Parliament in 1710, no longer condescended to use the word _toleration_ in reference to Dissenters, but spoke of _indulgence_ to be allowed “to scrupulous consciences,” while, after a long continued struggle, the high church party succeeded in passing the obnoxious bill against occasional conformity. All this occurred during Wesley’s childhood. At the time of Wesley’s birth, his brother Samuel was a sprightly boy, thirteen years of age, and a few months afterwards was sent to Westminster School, where he became distinguished for his scholarship and genius, and soon obtained a host of literary friends, from Lord Oxford, the Mecænas of his age, down to Addison, Atterbury, Pope, and Prior. Emilia Wesley, so gifted and so beautiful, was a year younger than Samuel, and was developing her exquisite sensibility and taste under the mental and moral cultivation of her mother. The ill-fated Susannah was a frolicsome child, eight years old. Mary, already deformed by an early sickness and the carelessness of her nurse, had arrived at the age of seven, and was fast becoming the favourite of her father’s family. The almost unequalled Mehetabel was six, and was so advanced in learning that two years afterwards she read the New Testament in Greek. Anne was yet an infant; and Martha, Charles, and Keziah were still unborn.