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. O