Tyler, Edward Royall

Tyler, Edward Royall a Congregational minister and author, was born at Guilford, Vt., Aulg. 3, 1800. He was the son of chief-justice Tyler, two of whose sons became ministers in the Protestant Episcopal Church and one in the Presbyterian. Edward was converted while a clerk in a counting-house in New York, and under the ministry of Dr. Spring. He graduated at Yale College in 1825, studied theology, and was ordained pastor of the South Church in Middletown, Conn., in 1827. Here he was successful in building up the Church, but ill-health induced his resignation in 1832. He was next pastor in Colebrook, Conn., 1833-36. For a year Mr. Tyler was agent of the American Antislavery Society, and from 1838 to its discontinuance in 1842 he was editor of the Connecticut Observer. In 1843 the New Englander was established under his proprietorship and editorship, and he continued in connection with it until his death, except during the periods of his prostration through illness. He died Sept. 28, 1848. Mr. Tyler contributed twenty-two articles to the first six volumes of the New Englander (see these enumerated in that periodical, 6:607). His other publications were, Slavery a Sin per se: —Lectures on Future Punishment (Middletown, 1829, 12mo): — Holiness Always Preferable to Sin: a Sermon (New Haven, 1829, 8vo). This opposed the position of some of the metaphysical divines of New England, that God sometimes preferred sin to holiness: The Doctrine of Elections: a Sermon (New Haven, 1831, 8vo): — The Congregational Catechism (ibid. 1844, 18mo). Tyler's writings are able, and some were thought at the time to be unsurpassed in their treatment of the subject in hand. Many were produced under the depressing influence of disease. "He was by nature, by culture, and by the grace of God, one of the best sort of men, in whom the elements of character are ennobled by faith and sanctified by devotion. We have seen his uncomplaining patience, his uniform cheerfulness, his kindness and sympathy, his generous impulses, his childlike piety." See New Englander, 1848, p. 603 sq. (by L. Bacon); Cong. Quar. Rev. 1866, p. 287.