Jonathan Edwards is considered by many to be America’s greatest theologian and most profound philosophical mind. He is noted particularly for his leadership in the Great Awakening of 1740-42, America’s first major revival. Less likely known, however, is the woman who stood at Edwards’ side for 31 years. Sarah Edwards, Jonathan’s wife, accomplished much of the household work and rearing of their 11 children, which thus allowed her husband much freedom to teach and preach- to the extent that his study and writing still affect Christendom more than 300 years later. [One of his most famous sermons is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”] The following is a biographical picture of the Edwards’written by Elisabeth D. Dodds for The Decision Magazine.
Edwards believed that “heaven was a world of love,” and he found confirmation of this in his own house. Samuel Hopkins, who spent many months with the family recalled of Sarah as a mother: “She had an excellent way of governing the children she knew how to make them regard and obey cheerfully, without loud angry words, mush less heavy blows. She seldom punished them; and in speaking to them used gentle and pleasant words,… Her system of discipline was begun 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…wisely reflecting that until a child will obey his parents he can never be brought to obey God.”…Sarah’s transactions with her children were reinforced because her husband treated her with total courtesy and serenely expected that each child would follow his example. One explanation for this may be found in Hopkins’ comment: “For [her children] she constantly and earnestly prayed and bore them on her heart before God…and that even before they were born.” That all 11 Edwards’ babies lived is in itself remarkable, and that they thrived in such precarious times is a comment on Sarah’s instinctive sense of nutrition, her clean house and her good health during pregnancy. The management of a large, busy household took leadership and efficiency. Mother had to be administrator, because the food and clothing depended on the mother’s ability to produce it. One source of the family’s stability was the steady dependable routine of prayers that they had together, before breakfast and again after supper. Edwards’ choice of Scripture to read at these times is revealing: he was partial to the poetic books of the Bible (the Psalms, Paul’s passage on charity, the homely advice of Ecclesiastes). The surge and thunder of the King James Bible, heard twice a day aloud in their father’s voice, became part of the children’s earliest memories. The Edwards boys studied at a school for boys; the girls, tutored by their father at home, learned Latin, Greek, rhetoric and penmanship. Edwards also expected all the children to know Jewish and Church history, the chronology of the biblical events, and how to correlate passages in the Old and New Testaments. A child never knew when, at the dinner table, he or she would be called upon to give a crisp answer to some such questions “How long after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar until Babylon was destroyed by Cyrus?”
A.E. Winship contended [in a study of the family], “And much of the capacity and talent, intensity and character, of more than 1400 of the Edwards family is due to Mrs. Edwards.” By 1900 when Winship made his study, the marriage of Jonathan and Sarah had produced…13 college presidents; 65 professors; 100 lawyers and a dean of an outstanding law school; 30 judges; 66 physicians; 80 holders of public office {including three U. W. senators, mayors of three large cities, governors of three states, a vice president of the United States and a comptroller of the U.S. Treasury}. Members of the family wrote 135 books and edited 18 journals and periodicals. They entered the ministry in platoons and sent 100 missionaries overseas, as well as stocking many mission boards with lay trustees. Yet all this achievement came out of a family with no large inherited fortune. Has any other mother contributed more vitality to the leadership of a nation?
