His aged mother was still living, but was crushed with poverty, and had been in danger of imprisonment for debt. For about thirty years she had been a lonely widow, and seems to have been dependent upon her son Samuel’s £10 per annum for her daily bread. The question naturally occurs, Was the poor rector the only one willing to assist his mother? Was nothing done for her by her son Matthew? Matthew rose to considerable eminence in the medical profession, and had an extensive and profitable practice in London. Thirty years after the period of which we are now writing, when he visited the Epworth family, he is represented as a man of wealth, and yet where is the evidence that he helped to support his mother? Matthew Wesley is described by his niece Mehetabel as one of the gentlest of human beings, and as rescuing thousands from the grave by his healing skill. He was of sufficient eminence to have his death celebrated in the poetical department of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1737; but, excepting a little kindness shown to one or two of his brother’s children, we are left without evidence that he possessed any of that nobility of heart, which prompted the embarrassed rector to squeeze out of his scanty income the pittance which he yearly gave to his much-loved mother. Samuel Wesley’s attachment to the Established Church was conscientious and strong; otherwise there was enough in his mother’s history to have made him its enemy for ever. By the relentless and intolerant bigotry of that Church, her husband had been deprived of the means of sustaining his family, and had been persecuted and driven from place to place, and not allowed the opportunity of providing for either his wife or his children. By the same Church’s intolerance, he had been brought to an untimely grave; and his widow, for long, long years, had been struggling with abject poverty. Her son Samuel knew all this; and yet, notwithstanding his having been trained for the Dissenting ministry, he entered the very Church which had inflicted so much misery upon his father, and which, to the day of her death, made Dr Thomas Fuller’s niece, Samuel Wesley’s mother, a needy object of charity and alms. Nothing but conscientious conviction of duty, could have induced such a man to attach himself to such a Church.