John (ESV Edition): That You May Believe (Preaching the Word) by Hughes R. Kent

Author:Hughes, R. Kent [Hughes, R. Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781433539213
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2014-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

31

Ultimate Ancestry

JOHN 8:37–47

AT THE END OF THE SUMMER OF 1874, an unusual gathering took place. It was remarkably fine weather for September when four or five hundred descendants of Jonathan Edwards poured into the resort town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a family reunion. They lunched under a great tent provided by Yale University, admired memorabilia from the Edwards family—such as Sarah Edwards’s wedding dress and the silver bowl from which Jonathan ate his nightly porridge—and poked around the old house, which was substantially unchanged. That gathering teemed with professors, business executives, government officials, ministers, and, according to one account, women of unusual beauty and force of personality. The mood of the reunion was expressed by the initiator of the gathering when he said, “Let God be praised for such a man.” His remarks were followed by many laudatory speeches that excited the glee of Jonathan Edwards’s descendants. All in all, it was as proud a celebration of ancestry as has ever been held in America. A study by the New York Genealogical and Historical Society says: “Probably no two people married since the beginning of the 18th century have been progenitors of so many distinguished persons as were Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierrepont.”

Twenty-six years later, in 1900, a man by the name of A. E. Winship did a study of Edwards’s descendants. The results have become famous. Winship concluded that from that single union of Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierrepont came thirteen college presidents, sixty-five professors, one hundred lawyers and a dean of an outstanding law school, thirty judges, sixty-six physicians and a dean of a medical school, and eighty holders of public office, among them three United States senators, mayors of three large cities, governors of three states, a vice-president of the United States, and a controller of the United States Treasury. Winship concluded:

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