Name of a family of clergymen in the Episcopal Church. They were of Massachusetts origin, and the patronymic changed from Atkins to Tyng on the inheritance of some English property. The first, Stephen Higginson, was born on the 1st of March 1800, in Newburyport, MA, was graduated at Harvard, 1817; took orders in the Episcopal Church in 1821; held pastorates in Georgetown, District of Columbia, and in St. Anne’s, MD; then in Philadelphia sixteen years from 1829; then rector of St. George’s Church, New York, for thirty-three years, during which time the congregation removed from Beekman Street to a splendid brownstone edifice in Stuyvesant Square. He died at Irvington, NY, on the 4th of September 1885. This Dr. Tyng was for many years the leader of the Low Church party in the Episcopal Church, during which time he turned large sums of money into the support of evangelical enterprises. He was a famous pulpit orator in his time, and an eloquent platform speaker. In Sunday school work he was an efficient organizer, and his schools were famous. He edited several evangelical weeklies, published many tracts and sermons, through the Evangelical Knowledge Society, which he created for such purposes. Of the books he left behind him the best are Law and Gospel (1832); Recollections of England (1847); Forty Years in Sunday Schools (1860); The Prayer Book Illustrated by Scripture (1867); and a memoir of his son, Dudley.—This son, Dudley Atkins, was born in Maryland, 1825; educated at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Alexandria Theological Seminary; preached, as rector, in Columbus and Cincinnati, OH, in Charleston, WV, and, as his father’s successor, at the Church of the Epiphany, Philadelphia. In 1854 he preached abolition sermons, and was forced to resign his parish. He organized a new one on Filbert Street, but died soon after, on the 19th of April 1858, near Philadelphia. He left several books of ephemeral interest and evangelical character.—Another son, Stephen Higginson, was born in Philadelphia, on the 20th of June 1839. He was educated at Williams College, 1858, and Alexandria Seminary, 1861; rector of a church on Lexington Avenue, New York; army chaplain, 1864; organized Church of the Holy Trinity, New York, in 1865; built a fine structure for it near the Grand Central depot; tried and publicly censured for preaching in a Methodist church, in New Brunswick, NJ, without the consent of the Episcopal rectors of that city; wrought in evangelical revival movements in New York; engaged in life insurance business in Paris in 1881 for a large New York company.
