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Page 10
Contrast this group of sixteen men and women with the five sons of Max
and the women with whom they lived. In this group there was not a strain
of industry, virtue, or scholarship. They were licentious, ignorant,
profane, lacking ambition to keep them out of poverty and crime.
They drifted into whatever it was easiest to do or to be. Midday and
midnight, heaven and its opposite, present no sharper contrasts than
the children and the children-in-law of Jonathan Edwards and of Max.
The two men were born in rural communities, they both lived on the
frontier; but the one was born in a Christian home, was the son of a
clergyman, of a highly educated man who took the highest honors Harvard
could give, was himself highly educated in home, school, and at Yale
College, always associated with pure-minded, earnest persons, and
devoted his thought and activity to benefiting mankind.
Max was the opposite of all this. There is no knowledge of his childhood
or of his parentage. He was not bad, as bad men go; he was jolly, could
tell a good story, though they were always off color, could trap unwary
animals skillfully, was a fairly good shot; but no one was the better
for anything that he ever said, thought, or did. Jollity, shiftlessness,
and lack of purpose in one man have given to the world a family of
1,200, mostly paupers and criminals; while Mr. Edwards, who never
amused any one, who was always chaste, earnest, and noble, has given to
the world a family of more than 1,400 of the world's noblemen, who have
magnified strength and beauty all over the land, illustrating grandly
these beautiful lines of Lowell:
"Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own."
CHAPTER V
MRS. EDWARDS AND HOME TRAINING
Much of the capacity and talent, intensity and character of the more
than 1,400 of the Edwards family is due to Mrs. Edwards. None of the
brothers or sisters of Jonathan Edwards had families with any such
marvelous record as his, and to his wife belongs not a little of the
credit.
At the age of twenty-four Mr. Edwards was married to Sarah Pierrpont,
aged seventeen. She had an inheritance even more refined and vigorous
than that of Mr. Edwards. She was descended on her father's side from
the choicest of the Pierrpont family of England and New England. Her
father was one of the most famous of New Haven clergymen, one of the
principal founders, and a trustee and lecturer of Yale College. On her
mother's side she was a granddaughter of Rev. Thomas Hooker, of
Hartford, "the father of the Connecticut churches," and one of the grand
men in early American history.
Personally, she was so beautiful and so noble-minded that at the age
of thirteen she was known far and near for her Christian character and
exceptional ability. While she was still but thirteen and Mr. Edwards
twenty, he wrote in a purely disinterested way of the remarkable girl:
"She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness, and universal benevolence of
mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly;
and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for
what."
Mr. Edwards was desirious of being married when he went to Northampton
as associate pastor with his grandfather, Dr. Stoddard. Miss Pierrpont
was only sixteen years of age, and she declined to be married until she
was seventeen. He insisted, but she persisted in her refusal.
Mrs. Edwards lived in her children. To her husband came honor and glory
in his lifetime, but to her came denial, toil and care. At eighteen,
this young, beautiful, brilliant wife became a mother, and until she was
forty, there was never a period of two years in which a child was not
born to them, and no one of the eleven children died until after the
last child was born. It was a home of little children. Her husband had
no care for the household and she wished him to have none. It was her
insistence that he should have thirteen hours of every twenty-four for
his study. Whatever may have been the contribution of Mr. Edwards to the
inheritance of the family, they owed the charming environment of the
home to their mother.
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