Theodore L. Cuyler

Theodore L. Cuyler c. 1902

Theodore Ledyard Cuyler (January 10, 1822 – February 26, 1909) was a leading Presbyterian minister and religious writer in the United States.

Biography

Market Street Reformed Church
Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church
Cuyler Gore Park, near Lafayette Avenue

Cuyler was born at Aurora, New York, but his father died before he was five years old.[1] Cuyler graduated from Princeton University in 1841 and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1846. He first became a pastor in Burlington, New Jersey.[2] Successful in reviving the flagging church, he was called in 1853 as pastor of the Market Street Dutch Reformed Church in New York City. His success there led to Cuyler's installation in 1860 as the pastor of the Park Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, from which he oversaw the construction of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church a block away. Completed in 1862, the church served the largest Presbyterian congregation in the United States. Cuyler's friends and acquaintances included a staggeringly large number of other contemporary notables, including Horatius Bonar, Samuel Hanson Cox, Phillips Brooks, Horace Bushnell, Horace Greely, James McCosh, Gilbert Haven, Joseph Addison Alexander, Albert Barnes, William E. Dodge, Newman Hall, Richard Salter Storrs, Philip Schaff, Stephen H. Tyng, Charles Spurgeon, Benjamin M. Palmer, D. L. Moody, Charles G. Finney, President Benjamin Harrison, Vice President Henry Wilson, and Prime Minister William E. Gladstone.

A theological conservative, Cuyler was also an outspoken supporter of the temperance movement and an avid abolitionist. In 1872, Cuyler invited Sarah Smiley, a Quaker, to be the first woman ever to preach from a Presbyterian pulpit. Besides numerous books, Cuyler wrote more than four thousand articles, mostly for the religious press.[3]

Cuyler Gore, a park in Brooklyn, was named for him just before the turn of the 20th century.[4] Cuyler politely declined a proposal that his statue be erected there, instead asking only that the park continue to bear his name and "be always kept as bright and beautiful with flowers as it is now."[5]

Publications

Books:

See also

References

  1. ↑ "THEODORE L. CUYLER, D.D.", The New York Times" (October 26, 1874), p. 2.
  2. ↑ Google Books Recollections of a Long Life, Cuyler's autobiography
  3. ↑ Recollections of a Long Life, 95.
  4. ↑ Cuyler Gore.
  5. ↑ Recollections of a Long Life, 300-01.
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