Rev. Charles Augustus Hay Papers

Charles Hay was born on February 11, 1821, at York, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of John and Eliza (Ebert) Hay.Charles attended the York County Academy and the German Reformed High School and received private instruction from his uncle, John Gottlieb Morris. After graduating from Pennsylvania (now Gettysburg) College in 1839 and from Gettysburg Theological Seminary in 1841, he went to Germany for two years of study at the universities of Berlin and Halle. At Halle, like many another American student, he won the fatherly interest of Friedrich Tholuck. In 1843, Charles Hay was licensed to preach and, after nine months’ labor at Middletown, Maryland, was made professor of Biblical literature and German, at a salary of $500 a year, in Gettysburg Seminary. Himself a lover of Peace and moderate views, he was dismayed to see the General Synod split into two hostile camps, the “American Lutherans” and the advocates of “Old Lutheranism, ” and realized that the Seminary was to be the scene of a pitched battle between the contending forces. He also felt keenly his lack of pastoral experience and was in need of additional income. Accordingly, on the advice of his uncle and of his former teacher, Charles Philip Krauth, he resigned in 1848 and, after a brief pastorate at Hanover, Pennsylvania, accepted a call in 1849 to Zion Church, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to which he ministered with notable success for sixteen years.

During the Civil War for some unwise criticism of Gen. John Ellis Wool’s lenience to Southern sympathizers he was once arrested and arraigned before the military authorities in Baltimore, but he was quickly released. Hay remained loyal to the General Synod when it was disrupted in 1864. Conservative though he was in theology, he had previously shown his repugnance to strict confessionalism by withdrawing with his congregation in 1857 from the Ministerium of Pennsylvania and joining the Synod of East Pennsylvania. In 1865 he was recalled to Gettysburg as professor of Hebrew and Old Testament theology, pastoral theology, and German. There he taught, preached, and studied until his death twenty-eight years later. Hay had been president of the board of directors of the Seminary from 1861 to 1863. For forty years he was a trustee of Pennsylvania College. As librarian of the Seminary and curator of the Lutheran Historical Society he showed foresight and energy in collecting manuscripts, books, and documents. He translated Luther’s Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (1892), and was cotranslator with Henry Eyster Jacobs of Heinrich Schmid’s influential Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1876; 1889). He died at Gettysburg after an illness of only a few days and was buried at Harrisburg.