Perhaps there is no period in English history more pregnant with painful interest than the first twenty-one years of Samuel Wesley’s life. He came into the world four months after that dark day of St Bartholomew, when his father, and his grandfather, and more than two thousand other godly ministers of Christ, were ejected from their churches, and driven from their homes. When he was yet a child, the great plague of London swept away one hundred thousand of its inhabitants; and the great fire made nearly the whole city a sightless heap of cinders, from the Tower to Temple Bar. Taking advantage of the confusion produced by these terrible events, the Covenanters in the West of Scotland rose up, and demanded redress of their grievances, and the removal of Episcopacy. Archbishop Sharp, exchanging the crosier for the sword, took the field against them. Forty were killed on Pentland Hills, and one hundred and thirty taken prisoners. Ten were hanged in Edinburgh upon one gibbet, and thirty-five more were sent back to the west of Scotland, and there hanged, in front of their own dwellings, the ministers of the Established Church declaring them damned to all eternity for their rebellion, and the archbishop employing his Episcopal genius in the invention of a new infernal instrument of torture, and spending his hours out of the sacred pulpit, not so much in sacred exercises as in studying how to make “the boots” excruciate the surviving associates of those executed men. Clarendon, who had much to do with the passing of the Act of Uniformity, was now deprived of the great seal, was accused of treason, and obliged to flee to France for safety. Sir Matthew Hale, Bishop Wilkins, and others, made an effort to have the Presbyterians comprehended in the Established Church, and to secure toleration for all the other dissenting sects; but the orthodoxy of parliament was as intolerant as ever, and it was a common saying at the time, that whoever proposed new laws about religion ought to do it with a rope round his neck. The bishops and High Churchmen continued to preach the divine right of kings and passive obedience, and the court plunged more deeply than ever into debauchery and sin.