Clergyman
Centurion, 1920–1958
Born 18 January 1886 in New York (Manhattan), New York
Died 28 February 1958 in New Milford, Connecticut
Proposed by William Milligan Sloane and Henry Evertson Cobb
Elected 6 March 1920 at age thirty-four
Century Memorial
Tertius Van Dyke graduated from Princeton (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1908 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1913. Later he took the M.A. at Oxford.
Like his father, he was a Presbyterian minister, and he started out by being pastor of the old Spring Street Church in one of the most depressed areas of the City. After service in the First World War, and then as secretary to his father at The Hague, he came back to New York, and became pastor of the Park Avenue Church. After six years, however, he resigned to serve as minister to the Congregational Church in Washington (Connecticut), then as Headmaster of the Gunnery School, and finally as Dean of Hartford Theological Seminary until his retirement in 1954.
Van Dyke was a natural teacher; but being an ordained clergyman he was under some pressure to follow that calling. This produced a restless variety in his occupations, but at the end he managed a happy combination at Hartford Seminary, where he could put everything he knew to good advantage without being unduly bothered by the details of living.
He was gentle and winsome in spirit but exceedingly orderly in his conduct of affairs. Perhaps his outstanding characteristics were forthrightness and friendliness. He never failed to make his own position clear on any matter, however controversial; but he always did so gracefully and with disarming understanding of the other man’s point of view. His relations with his Maker were clear and uncomplicated, and ultimately determinative of what he made of his life.
George W. Martin
1959 Century Association Yearbook
