THE CHILDREN'S START IN LIFE 35 



of these men in intellectual force and moral qual- 

 ities. 



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 clergy- 

 man, of a highly educated man who took the 

 highest honors Harvard could give, was himself 

 highly educated in home, school, and at Yale Col- 

 lege, 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 any- 

 thing 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 pau- 



