3. Shall be able to study more closely, without injury to my health.
4. Shall need less time for sleep.
5. Shall more seldom be troubled with the headache."
Mr. Edwards was twenty-three years of age when he was ordained at Northampton as a.s.sociate pastor with his grandfather Stoddard, then in his 84th year, and the 54th year of his pastorate. Soon after this Mr.
Stoddard died and Mr. Edwards became pastor in full charge and remained for twenty-five years. He was a great student and thinker. He rose at four o"clock and spent thirteen hours a day in his study. It is worth while to follow the personal intellectual habits of the man whose descendants we are to study. When he was ready for the consideration of a great subject he would set apart a week for it and mounting his horse early Monday morning would start off for the hills and forests. When he had thought himself up to a satisfactory intensity he would alight, fasten his horse, go off into the woods and think himself through that particular stage of the argument, then he would pin a bit of paper on some particular place on his coat as a reminder of the conclusion he had reached. He would then ride on some miles further and repeat the experience. Not infrequently he would be gone the entire week on a thinking expedition, returning with the front of his coat covered with the scalps of intellectual victories. Without stopping for any domestic salutations he would go at once to his study and taking off these bits of paper in the same order in which he had put them on would carefully write out his argument. In nothing did Jonathan Edwards stand out so clearly as boy, youth and man as in his sacrifice of every other feature of his life for the attainment of power as a thinker.
Mr. Edwards has gone into history as a theologian of the most stalwart character. It is undeniable that he preached the most terrific doctrine ever uttered by an American leader, but this was only the logical result of the intellectual projection of his effort to make sacrifices in order to benefit humanity. As a child he sacrificed everything for health and virtue that he might have influence, and as a man he knew no other plan or purpose in life. His masterpiece is upon the "will" which he developed to the full in himself.
The greatest religious awakening that the Western world has ever known was started in his church at Northampton, not over ecclesiastical differences, or theological discussion but over a question of morality among the young people of the town. It had to do with the impropriety of the young ladies entertaining their gentlemen friends on Sunday evenings and especially of their allowing them to remain to such unreasonable hours. And the issue which ultimately drove him from his pastorate, after twenty-five years of service, by an almost unanimous vote was not one of ecclesiasticism or theology, but of morals among the young people. He insisted upon vigorous action in relation to the loose and as he thought immoral reading of the youth of the town. As this involved some prominent families he had to retire from the pastorate.
The views of Mr. Edwards on pastoral work reveal the singleness of purpose of the man as a student and thinker. He never made pastoral calls. He had no criticism to make of those pastors who had talent for entertaining people by occasional calls, but as he had no gifts in that direction he regarded it advisable to use his time in cultivating such talents as he had. Whoever wished to talk with him about personal, moral or religious conditions found in him a profitable counsellor. In his preaching, which was equal to anything America has ever known, he made no attempt to win his hearers by tricks of oratory or by emotional appeals, though he had a most fascinating personality. He was six feet in height, slender in form, with a high, broad forehead, eyes piercing and luminous and a serene countenance. In the pulpit he was graceful, easy, natural and earnest, though he had little action. He rested his left elbow on the pulpit and held his ma.n.u.script in his left hand while with his right he turned the leaves. In him were combined the intellectual and moral vigor which are calculated to make the progenitor of a great family.
CHAPTER IV
THE CHILDREN"S START IN LIFE
The eleven children of Jonathan Edwards had an unenviable start in life so far as their environment was concerned. The oldest was still in her teens when serious trouble arose in the parish at Northampton. Mr.
Edwards was pastor at Northampton for twenty-five years, and a more fruitful pastorate or a more glorious ministerial career for a quarter of a century no man could ask. He made that church on the frontier the largest Protestant church in the world, and it was the most influential as well as the best known. There began the greatest religious awakening of modern times. In his church, resulting from his preaching, began a revival which stirred into activity every church in Ma.s.sachusetts, every church in the colonies, and most of the Protestant churches of Great Britain and Europe.
After this long and eminently successful pastorate, Mr. Edwards preached a sermon about the reading and conversation of young people upon subjects of questionable propriety, which led to such local excitement that upon the recommendation of an ecclesiastical council he was dismissed by a vote of 200 to 20, and the town voted that he be not permitted on any occasion to preach or lecture in the church.
Mr. Edwards was wholly unprepared financially for this unusual ecclesiastical and civic action. He had no other means of earning a living, so that, until donations began to come in from far and near, Mrs. Edwards, at the age of forty, the mother of eleven children with the youngest less than a year old, was obliged to take in work for the support of the family. After a little time Mr. Edwards secured a small mission charge in an Indian village where there were twelve white and 150 Indian families. Here he remained eight years in quiet until, a few weeks before his death, he was called to the presidency and pastorate of Princeton, then a young and small college.
The last four years of their life at Northampton were indescribably trying to the children. Human nature was the same then as now, and everyone knows how heavily the public dislike of a prominent man bears upon his children. The conventionalities which keep adults within bound in speech and action are unknown to children, and what the parents say behind a clergyman"s back, children say to his children"s face. This period of childhood social horror ended only by removal to a missionary parsonage among the Stockbridge Indians, where they lived for eight years. Their playmates were Indian children and youth. Half the children of the family talked the Indian language as well and almost as much as they did the English language.
In the years of aspiration these children were away from all society life and educational inst.i.tutions, in the home of a poor missionary family among Indians when Indian wars were a reality. When Mr. Edwards accepted gratefully this mission church his oldest child, a daughter, was twenty-two, his youngest son was less than a year old. All of the boys and three of the girls were under twelve years of age when they went to the Indian village, and all but one were under twenty. When their missionary home was broken up five of them were still under twenty, so that the children"s inheritance was not of wealth, of literary or scholastic environment, or of cultured or advantageous society. Everything tends to show how completely Mr. Edwards" sons and daughters were left to develop and improve their inheritance of intellectual, moral, and religious aspiration.
In these years Mr. Edwards was writing the works which will make him famous for centuries. One of the daughters married Rev. Aaron Burr, the president of Princeton, then a very small inst.i.tution. Upon the death of this son-in-law, Mr. Edwards was chosen to succeed him, but while at Princeton, before he had fairly entered upon his duties at the college, he died of smallpox. His widowed daughter, who cared for him, died a few days later leaving two children, and his widow, who came for the grandchildren, soon followed the husband and daughter to the better land.
Mr. Edwards died at fifty-six, and his widow a few weeks later. Both died away from home, for the family was still among the Stockbridge Indians. The oldest son was but twenty, and there were five children younger than he. The youngest son was eight and the other only thirteen.
To make the picture more clear it must be understood that to these six orphans, under twenty-one, there came at the time of their father"s and mother"s deaths two little orphans aged four and two respectively, Sarah Burr and her brother Aaron. Here was a large family from which father and mother, older sister and brother-in-law had been taken almost at a single blow, with two extra orphans to care for.
And with all this there was no adequate financial inheritance. The inventory of Jonathan Edwards" property is interesting. Among the live stock, which included horses and cows, was a slave upon whom a moderate value was placed. The slave was named t.i.tus, and he was rated under "quick stock" and not "live stock," at a value of $150. The silver was inventoried as a tankard valued at $60, a can and porringer at $47, and various other articles valued at $85. The chief material legacy was his library, which was inventoried as consisting of 301 volumes, 536 pamphlets, forty-eight maps, thirty unpublished ma.n.u.scripts and 1,074 ma.n.u.script sermons prepared for the printer. It was valued at $415.
If Jonathan Edwards did not leave a large financial legacy, he did impart to his children an intellectual capacity and vigor, moral character, and devotion to training which have projected themselves through eight generations without losing the strength and force of their great ancestor. Of the three sons and eight daughters of Jonathan Edwards there was not one, nor a husband or wife of one, whose character and ability, whose purpose and achievement were not a credit to this G.o.dly man. Of the seventy-five grandchildren, with their husbands and wives, there was but one for whom an apology may be offered, and nearly every one was exceptionally strong in scholarship and moral force.
We have paused long enough on the threshold of the descendants of Jonathan Edwards. We have seen the estimate in which he was held by his contemporaries at home and abroad, and by close students of the history of his times. We have seen what he inherited and by what training and in what environment he was developed. We have also seen the terrible strain to which his children were subjected in childhood from lack of school privileges and pleasing social conditions. It remains to be seen what kind of men and women these children became with childhood disadvantages, but with a grand inheritance and the best of home training.
Remember the size, ages, and financial condition of the family when the father died--the sons being aged eight, thirteen and twenty--and then consider the fact that the three sons graduated from Princeton, and five of the daughters married college graduates, three of them of Yale and one each of Harvard and Princeton. A man might well be content to die without lands or gold when eight sons and sons-in-laws were to be men of such capacity, character, and training as are found in this family.
They were not merely college graduates, but they were eminent men.
One held the position of president of Princeton and one of Union College, four were judges, two were members of the Continental Congress, one was a member of the governor"s council in Ma.s.sachusetts, one was a member of the Ma.s.sachusetts war commission in the Revolutionary war, one was a state senator, one was president of the Connecticut house of representatives, three were officers in the Revolutionary war, one was a member of the famous const.i.tutional convention out of which the United States was born, one was an eminent divine and pastor of the historic North church of New Haven, and one was the first grand master of the Grand Lodge of Masons in Connecticut. This by no means exhausts the useful and honorable official positions occupied by the eight sons and sons-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, and it makes no account of their writings, of noted trials that they conducted, but it gives some hint of the pace which Mr. Edwards" children set for the succeeding generations.
It should be said that the daughters were every way worthy of distinguished husbands, and it ought also to be said that the wives of the sons were worthy of these men in intellectual force and moral qualities.
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 a.s.sociated 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 n.o.ble, has given to the world a family of more than 1,400 of the world"s n.o.blemen, who have magnified strength and beauty all over the land, ill.u.s.trating grandly these beautiful lines of Lowell:
"Be n.o.ble! and the n.o.bleness 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 princ.i.p.al 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 n.o.ble-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 a.s.sociate 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.
This was a delightful home, as many persons have testified who knew it.
I saw recently the diary of the famous George Whitefield, where he wrote that he sometimes wondered if it was not the Lord"s will that he should marry, that he might thereby be more useful, and that if it was the Lord"s will that he should marry, he wished to be reconciled thereto, but he did hope that the Lord would send him as a wife such a woman as Mrs. Edwards, whom he considered the most beautiful and n.o.ble wife for a Christian minister that he had ever known. If there be a more charming tribute to woman than this, I have not seen it.
In view of the character of her children and their great success in life, it may be interesting to know how she brought up the children, of whom there were so many, and for which the schools did so little. This is the testimony of one who knew of her home life well: "She had an excellent way of governing her children; she knew how to make them regard and obey her cheerfully. She seldom punished them, and in speaking to them used gentle and pleasant words. When she had occasion to reprove or rebuke, she would do it in a few words, without warmth and noise, and with all calmness and gentleness of mind. In her directions and reproofs of matters of importance, she would address herself to the reason of her children, that they might not only know her inclination and will, but at the same time be convinced of the reasonableness of it.
She had need to speak but once and she was obeyed; murmuring and answering again were not known among them. In their manners they were uncommonly respectful to their parents. When their parents came into the room, they all rose instinctively from their seats and never resumed them until their parents were seated; and when either parent was speaking, no matter with whom they had been conversing, they were all immediately silent.
"Quarreling and contention were in her family wholly unknown. She carefully observed the first appearance of resentment and ill-will in her young children towards any person whatever, and did not connive at it, but was careful to show her displeasure, and suppress it to the utmost; yet not by angry, wrathful words.
"Her system of discipline began at a very early age, and it was her rule to resist the first, as well as every subsequent exhibition of temper or disobedience in the child, however young, until its will was brought into submission to the will of the parents."
It is needless to say that all this added materially to the good inheritance of the children.
CHAPTER VI
CAPACITY, CHARACTER AND TRAINING
In view of what has been learned regarding Jonathan Edwards, his ancestors and his children, his grandchildren might have found some excuse for presuming upon the capacity and character which they inherited. In their veins was the blood of famous lines of n.o.ble men and women; the blood of Edwards, Stoddard, Pierrpont, and Hooker was thrilling in their thought and intensifying their character. They had inherited capacity and character at their best, but they did not presume upon it. If ever inheritance would justify indifference to training, it was in the case of the grandchildren of Jonathan Edwards, but they were far from indifferent to their responsibility.