Charles Herbert Richards, a native of Meriden, New Hampshire, was a son of the Rev. Cyrus Smith Richards and his wife Helen Dorothy (Whiton). His paternal line sprang from William Richards, who was in Plymouth, Massachussets, in 1633; his first Colonial maternal ancestor was Thomas Whiton, who came to Plymouth in 1635.
After preparing for college at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, of which his father was principal for thirty-five years, he spent two years at Amherst and then transferred to Yale, graduating with high scholastic honors in 1860. His theological course at Union Seminary, begun after a year of teaching at Kimball Union, was interrupted by another year of teaching and by a term at the front in the service of the Christian Commission. He completed his studies at Andover in 1865.
He was ordained July 16, 1866, at Kokomo, Indiana, where he was pastor from 1865 to 1867. Between 1867 and 1890, when he held a pastorate at the First Congregational Church in Madison, Wisconsin, he became prominently identified with civic and educational affairs and lectured widely throughout the northwest; he also took a deep interest in the state university, upon whose students as well as those of the normal school he exerted a marked influence. He was president of the New England Society, chaplain of the state legislature, and from 1885 to 1890 president of the Congregational Home Missionary Society of Wisconsin.
In 1890 he assumed the pastorate of the Central Congregational Church of Philadelphia, where he remained for the next thirteen years. At the end of that time he became corresponding secretary of the Congregational Church Building Society with offices in New York and from 1915 until his death served as educational secretary of the society.
He was a trustee of the Congregational National Council from 1901 to 1907 and an editor of the American Missionary from its foundation.
From 1909 to 1919 he served with great ability as chairman of the Commission on Public Worship of the Congregational National Council, for he was an accomplished musician, an authority on hymnology, and deeply interested in improving the services in the Congregational churches.
As a result of his work for the Congregational Church Building Society, Richards became nationally known in his own communion and beyond its borders. Deeply impressed with the need of improving the architecture of the churches of his denomination, he lectured extensively on the subject and contributed many articles to the Church Building Quarterly and to the Congregational Church Building Society Annual, with both of which he was editorially connected. In the course of his career he compiled as aids to worship Songs of Christian Praise (1880); Scripture Selections for Responsive Reading (1880); Songs of Prayer and Praise (1883); Songs of the Christian Life (1912); Book of Church Services (1922). In addition, he published pamphlets on a variety of subjects, contributed many articles to the religious press, and left in manuscript a book, Make Your Church Attractive (1925), which appeared posthumously.
Tolerant, hopeful, sympathetic, he was modern in his thinking but not controversial.
On November 18, 1868, he was married to Marie Miner of Charles City, Iowa, who died in 1915. Of their six children, three daughters survived their parents.
