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Few men can ever have taught the Christian doctrines as they were taught at Drew for twenty years by Olin Alfred Curtis. Classes in Systematic Theology are not regarded in most seminaries as especially exciting occasions, but there was no lack of excitement in classes where this master-teacher was in charge. He was spare of frame, and his health was never robust, but he was charged with an intellectual and spiritual energy which on occasion was almost irresistible. Speech would sometimes come from him with the tempestuous onrush of a mountain torrent, but he could also conduct a classroom recitation with quiet restraint. Both characteristics were seen in conjunction in his famous Martensen seminar. For a little while, his uncanny power of analysis of the subject presented would suggest a mind completely detached and objective, and then that same mind was likely to come to a sudden glow-- "fused with the inert stuff"-- and note-taking became both impossible and unnecessary under the devastating onslaught or the impassioned advocacy that followed. Often, at the close of one of his characteristic outbursts, the class remained for moments in perfect silence, and then filed out of the room as men should who for a little while had seen the veil rent asunder and the Holy of Holies authentically disclosed.
There are men still living who will declare that nobody ever made things divine more real to them than did Dr. Curtis. His power to do this was no accident. By great tribulation he had entered into the Kingdom. He had known disappointment, bereavement, misunderstanding. He had wrestled in the deep places, and the marks of it were on him. He had, there is good reason to believe, a sense of growing loneliness of spirit in a world, even in a church, to which he seemed at many points an extremist. But if ever a man believed that nothing mattered except the offering of a complete testimony to Jesus Christ, that man was Dr. Curtis. He believed that it had been given to him to see the Christian faith as that total organism of fact and truth which answered to existence as the concave answers to the convex. That being the case, he must tell what he saw; he must tell the meaning of it; he must make clear its overwhelming majesty; he must set forth its significance as the promise of a possible complete and everlasting redemption for every human soul.