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.”