No man can have the intellectual power, nobility of character, and
personal grandeur of Jonathan Edwards and transmit it to his children's
children for a century and a half who has not himself had a great
inheritance. The whole teaching of the culture of animals and plants
leaves no room to question the persistency of character, and this is
so grandly exemplified in the descendants of Mr. Edwards that it is
interesting to see what inheritances were focused in him.

It is not surprising to find that the ancestors of Mr. Edwards were
cradled in the intellectual literary activities of the days of Queen
Elizabeth. The family is of Welsh origin and can be traced as far as
1282, when Edward, the conquerer, appeared. His great-great-grandfather,
Richard Edwards, who went from Wales to London about 1580, was a
clergyman in the Elizabethan period. Those were days which provided
tonic for the keenest spirits and brightest minds and professional men
profited most from the influence of Spencer, Bacon, and Shakespeare.

Among the first men to come to the new colonies in New England was
William, a son of this clergyman, born about 1620, who came to Hartford,
where his son Richard, born 1647, the grandfather of Jonathan, was an
eminently prosperous merchant. Richard was an only son. The father of
Jonathan, Timothy Edwards, was an only son in a family of seven.
Aristocracy was at its height in the household of the merchants of
Hartford in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Harvard was America's only college, and it was a great event for a young
man to go from Hartford to Harvard, but this Timothy Edwards did, and he
took all attainable honors, graduating in 1661, taking the degrees
of A.B. and A.M. the same day, "an uncommon mark of respect paid