(High Quality FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: Mayer, Lewis, 1783-1...)
High Quality FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: Mayer, Lewis, 1783-1849 :History Of The German Reformed Church :1851 :Facsimile: Originally published by Philadelphia : Lippincott, Grambo & Co. in 1851. Book will be printed in black and white, with grayscale images. Book will be 6 inches wide by 9 inches tall and soft cover bound. Any foldouts will be scaled to page size. If the book is larger than 1000 pages, it will be printed and bound in two parts. Due to the age of the original titles, we cannot be held responsible for missing pages, faded, or cut off text.
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Lewis Mayer was born at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was the third of the seven children of George Ludwig Mayer, a prosperous, well-educated tradesman, by his second wife, Maria Barbara Haller, and the seventh in descent from Melchior Mayer, who was made Stadthauptmann of the Free Imperial City of Ulm in 1550. Lewis' father had emigrated with his parents from Ulm to Frederick, Maryland, in 1751-52 and settled later in Lancaster.
Mayer's father death in 1793 interfered seriously with his education. At Frederick, Md. , where Lewis was employed for a time, he attended an academy and was converted to the Reformed faith by the Rev. Daniel Wagner, who prepared him for the ministry.
Mayer was licensed in 1807 and ordained in 1808 by the Synod of the United States, and was pastor at Shepherdstown, Martinsburg, and Smithfield, Virginia, 1808-21, and at York, Pennsylvania, 1821-25. In 1818, despite threats of violence, he preached the first English sermon ever delivered in the Second Street Reformed Church of Baltimore. He was by this time one of the leaders of his denomination and especially prominent in the movement to secure an official theological seminary. In 1824 the Synod authorized the establishment of a seminary, which was to be affiliated with Dickinson College. Neither Philip Milledoler nor Samuel Helffenstein would accept the professorship; money and moral support were almost entirely lacking; and the prospect that the seminary would ever open was dark until Mayer himself agreed to undertake the work. After visiting the seminaries at Princeton and New Brunswick to obtain information about books and courses of study, he opened the seminary at Carlisle, Pa. , to five students in the spring of 1825. The seminary failed to attract many students, partly because of opposition to it among the conservative German congregations and partly because of its location in a region chiefly Scotch-Irish. In 1829 Mayer, acting on his own initiative, moved it to York, where it began to prosper. Daniel Young was called in to assist him, and a preparatory school was started with the brilliant Frederick Augustus Rauch as principal. In 1835 the school was moved to Mercersburg and was reorganized as Marshall College; when the seminary was also removed there in 1837 Mayer resigned. Since no one was available to take his place, he resumed his professorship in 1838. His doctrinal position had by this time become somewhat low-church; he found himself in sharp disagreement with the high-church Rauch, who was preparing the way for the "Mercersburg theology, " and in 1839 he resigned again. He spent the rest of his life in York, where he died.
Mayer was the author of Expository Lectures, or Discourses on Scriptural Subjects (1845), The Sin against the Holy Ghost (1867), and History of the German Reformed Church (1851), which brings the story of the Swiss Reformation down to the close of the year 1525. He was editor of the Magazine of the German Reformed Church from its first publication in 1827 until 1835. He accumulated much material relating to the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, and also published some sermons.
(High Quality FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: Mayer, Lewis, 1783-1...)
His qualifications as a teacher of theology were probably as adequate as those of any other German Reformed minister of the time. He had a very respectable command of Greek and Latin, had mastered Dutch, and could read French and Hebrew; he was an excellent preacher in both German and English; and he was more than merely well-read in Reformed theology. To his courage and unselfishness at a critical juncture his denomination owes much.
On November 5, 1809, Mayer married Catharine Line of Shepherdstown, who bore him a son and three daughters and died in 1820. Later he married Mary (Gonder) Smith of York, who survived him for almost sixteen years.
