Samuel Wesley was most distressingly embarrassed; but his embarrassments were not the results of wasteful or extravagant living. For about eleven years he had been a married minister of the Church of England. His professional income, for that entire period—after deducting the payments mentioned in the foregoing letter, for furniture, the Broad Seal, his first-fruits, his tenths and other taxes, the poor, his mother’s debt, and also including the £50 borrowed for farming purposes—did not amount to more than £600, which gives an average of £54, 10s. a-year, or twenty shillings and ninepence per week. Out of that amount of money, he had to maintain house, to find food and clothes for himself and for his wife; he had to meet the expenses connected with the birth of ten children, and the burial of five; and he had now a family to support, consisting of himself, his wife, five children, a maid-servant, and a parish apprentice-nine persons altogether. Samuel Wesley, after eleven years of hard struggling, was £300 in debt. No wonder! Let the reader look at the preceding figures and facts, and his surprise will be, not that the debt was so great, but that it was not greater. Many Methodists have a vague idea that the rector of Epworth was careless and improvident in the management of his pecuniary matters, and that this was the cause of his embarrassments; but to entertain such a thought is a cruel injustice done to the character of that distinguished man, and also an undeserved stigma cast upon the reputation of his invaluable wife. Let any one think of a clergyman of the Church of England having to maintain a large, and often an afflicted family, for eleven years, at the rate of two shillings and elevenpence-halfpenny per day, and we challenge him to deny that Samuel Wesley, now £300 in debt, was deserving not of censure, but of sympathy. Archbishop Sharpe, to whom Wesley’s letter was addressed, was an exceedingly kind and faithful friend. He submitted the painful circumstances of the poor rector to a number of his noble friends, some of whom generously responded, the Countess of Northampton sending him £20. The archbishop also wished to make an application to the House of Lords for what was technically called a “Brief;” in other words, a “letter patent, granting a licence for collecting money to rebuild churches, to restore loss by fire,” &c. These “briefs,” or letters patent were read in churches, and the sums collected were endorsed on them, with the signatures of the minister and churchwarden; after which the briefs and the money collected were delivered to the person or persons obtaining the briefs, who in their turn had to give an account, within two months, of the moneys received, before a master in Chancery appointed by the Lord Chancellor.