Marriage of Grimshaw

The great Haworth Methodist preacher William Grimshaw was an unconverted clergyman in 1735. He had already come under the conviction that would lead eventually to his conversion. His realisation of his lack of spirituality was a first step on the road to change. At this time he was trying to reform his life and began to urge his congregation to lead moral lives. He started praying four times a day, a practice he would continue after his conversion. But as he later admitted, all of this was but an earnest “working out a righteousness of his own,” in which he tried to balance the sins of his life with good deeds.
He went on like this for seven years (1734-1741). Sometimes, though, the futility of trying to trying to find salvation through the pathway of good works would overwhelm him and he would cry out in the middle of a service: “My friends, we are in a damnable state, and I scarcely know how we are to get out of it.” He was beginning to realise, in the words of one of his biogrpahers Frank Baker, that “he could not put himself right with God by a multitude of devotional exercises, however arduous.”
In 1735 he married a widow named Sarah Sutcliffe (1710-1739). Apparently she came riding by one day and made the oprioposal. He loved dearly but, after she had borne him two children, she died at the very young age of 29. Grimshaw was shattered.