Second Part of Cooke’s Centuries, Being a Defense and Confirmation of the First: Showing That Methodism Is Not a Branch of the Church of Christ (1855)

I am the maker of my full being; my relationships with my environment around me; friends, foes, father, mother, sisters, brothers, husband, children, and job. In short, all my experiences were my making. I am the maker of all this. I have made all this! I am responsible for my conditions, and more importantly, I have the power to remake and reshape all my relationships. This new insight empowered me. My father was certainly a terror to us, but he was also terrorized as a child and grew up an orphan from a young age on the lawless streets of a little town in Italy. My mother was naive and a martyr by nature. She worked hard and did the best she could under the circumstances, but she was not the cause of my suffering. They were souls like myself, and we were linked from the past.