When Jonathan Edwards was ministering at Stockbridge, he encouraged his son, the future theologian-pastor Jonathan Edwards, Jr., to spend time learning the culture and language of the Oneida.
The boy went with a missionary, Gideon Hawley, to an Oneida village at the head of the Susquehanna, about 200 miles away from his family. The young boy was here from April 1755 to mid-January 1756. What amazing confidence the senior Edwards and his wife Sarah must have had in a sovereign God to send their son into such a potentially dangerous place!
In the winter of 1756, the situation did indeed become too dangerous for the young Jonathan and Gideon to stay with the Oneida. War was engulfing the western frontier and the younger Edwards and Hawley trekked back to Fort Johnson, the fortified mansion of Sir William Johnson, now in present-day Amsterdam, New York. The young Edwards spent most of the winter there. The elder Edwards considered Johnson as ‘a man of not much religion’. What a contrast Johnson’s home would have been to the godly home in which the younger Edwards had been raised.
