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 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