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 institutions, 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