This post is from a previous installment of our Director and Founder, Dr. Michael Azad A. G. Haykin, on his substack Historia Ecclesiastica. To read the article in full and for more by Dr. Haykin, follow the link below and sign up to receive his posts directly to your inbox.
Two years after the death of his first wife Sarah in 1792, Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) married Ann Coles (1763–1825), a pastor’s daughter. When Fuller’s mother, Philippa, heard of her son’s impending second marriage, she told him that she wished his “poor children well.”
“Have you any reason to fear the contrary?” her son asked her. Philippa Fuller admitted she didn’t, but she reckoned that she herself would “not have made a good step-mother.”
Fuller, ever the plain speaker, replied to his mother, “And so from thence you judge that others will be the same. For my part I am persuaded now that I should be a kind father to any family put under my care.”[1] Though rarely touched upon in Fuller studies, Andrew Fuller was indeed “a kind father,” as is well seen in his relationship to his son Robert (1782–1809), who was named after either Fuller’s own father or one of his brothers…