These were days of terror and of suffering such as Englishmen now seldom think about. Thousands of disgraceful and heart-rending facts might be stated. Suffice it to remark that, notwithstanding the severity of law, the harshness of magistrates, the brutality of constables, the deceitfulness of spies, and the rudeness of the rabble, Nonconformists continued as numerous as ever. Their firmness of character, their plain, practical, and awakening ministry, the purity of their morals, their strict observance of the Sabbath, their care for family religion, their succession of able and learned preachers, the disgust at the persecutions they were made to suffer, and the reaction produced by pushing High Church principles to an unbearable extent, in the short space of a quarter of a century, brought about the English Revolution of 1688, and obtained for them that which is the birthright of all, liberty to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. Samuel Wesley began life amid all this royal perfidy, legalised suffering, and national excitement, and, as we shall shortly see, he was the son of one of the two thousand persecuted and martyr-like ministers, ejected from their churches and their homes by the tyrannic Act of Uniformity, passed and enforced in the year 1662. [This chapter has been compiled principally from Baxter’s _Life and Times_; Calamy’s _Nonconformist Memorials_; Calamy’s _Life and Times_; Macaulay’s _History_; Knight’s _Pictorial History of England_; Stoughton’s _Church and State Two Hundred Years Ago_; Alleine’s _Memorial_, by Stanford; Gauden’s _Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ Suspiria_, 1659; Walker’s _Sufferings of the Clergy_, 1714; _History of Modern Enthusiasm_, 1757; Rees’ _Encyclopædia_; _Encyclopædia Britannica_; and from tracts and pamphlets too numerous to mention.] CHAPTER II. PARENTAGE—1600–1670. Samuel Wesley was the grandson of Bartholomew Wesley, rector of Catherston, in Dorsetshire. Bartholomew Wesley was born about the year 1600; but the place of his nativity is not known. He received a university education, a fact indicating, to some extent, the circumstances and the religious opinions of his parents. Calamy informs us, that, while at the university, Bartholomew Wesley applied himself to the study of physic, as well as of divinity; and the knowledge which he acquired was of great advantage to him in the dark days of his after life. In 1640 he was inducted to the rectory of Charmouth, and in 1650 to that of Catherston; both of which he held until his ejectment in 1662. Catherston and Charmouth are villages in the south-western extremity of Dorsetshire; the former about a mile distant from the latter. Catherston stands on an eminence, and Charmouth in the valley adjoining it.