Years afterwards, in 1892, one of his own boys, even the biographer, delivered the Dudleian lecture at Harvard University in Appleton Chapel on "The Validity of non-Episcopal Ordination", or, more exactly, the validity of ordination by the congregation, according to the method of the primitive Christian Churches[5]. By a strange coincidence, it was on the same night, Dec. 7, on which Mr. Chambers was ordained, and thus the sixty-seventh anniversary of his ordination.
[5] See the Bibliotheca Sacra, for October, 1893.
Mr. Chambers left New Haven the next morning, Dec. 8th, 1825. The elms were leafless, but his heart was happy and his face radiant with joy. Coming back to minister to his constantly increasing flock, he baptized on the first Sunday in January, 1826, several new communicants and administered for the first time the memorial supper of Jesus. It was a day long to be remembered, for between seventy and eighty souls were on this occasion added to the church, and the young pastor, in the joy of his initial service, baptized the first child that ever received the dedicating waters from his hands, John Chambers Arrison, the first of a mighty host.
In 1875, the white-haired pastor who had welcomed 3,585 members into his church, said: "Thus it seemed that the tide of God's favor was taken at the flood, and it has brought us to where we are to-day".
CHAPTER VII.
HOME AND CHURCH. LOVE AND WORK.
Let us now look into John Chambers's inner life,—of the heart as well as the intellect. We have seen how the vigorous and lusty twig which grew up in the classical academy of Baltimore began to bend away from certain statements and formulæ in the Westminster symbols, as then interpreted to him, which gave the afterwards robust and widespreading tree a tremendous inclination. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." John Chambers's convictions shaped his message and colored all his preaching. There were probably reasons, other than those merely intellectual, for the young man's tremendous antipathy to the idea that the fullness of the Christian life and the message of Jesus could be compressed into the mathematical statements made at Westminster during the days of the British Commonwealth.
When I was a student at Rutgers College, New Brunswick, New Jersey, from 1865 to 1869, I was asked, as an incoming freshman, by the president, Rev. William H. Campbell, D.D., LL.D., concerning my religious training. I told him how much I owed to John Chambers in Philadelphia. A bland light overspread the full expanse of that face, so seamed with thought and studious toil and which nothing but warm affection could call handsome. Indeed, it seemed as though every wrinkle was smoothed out, as a prairie-like smile suffused its whole area. Then, laughing heartily, he said, "Well, I can remember when he had orthodoxy taught him with the sole of a slipper." Evidently then, according to the accepted and supposedly wholesome custom of the times, the future preacher received at intervals what was expected to be a physical aid to faith, though in reality the result was the reverse of what was expected. Whether the slipper was applied to the lad before or after intellectual defection, its use induced reaction. Whether, as is probable, the correction by leather came from the employer to whom the apprentice was bound, or from the schoolmaster is not known. The boy would not accept Westminsterism whole, certainly not as then interpreted.
Above all, this young Irish-American lad had a big, warm heart. As he read the Scriptures for himself he was early filled with that idea, which afterwards he infused into the lives of thousands, that the gospel is a glorious message to the individual, that the Christian life is a Way, as well as a belief, that there are elements in religious life and experience which do not submit to exact definitions, and that the mercy of God is the largest factor of the Divine life toward wrong-doing man. In this the time of his youth, as well as all through his life, he felt deeply rather than thought coolly. Whether we must ascribe most or all of the results to the towering personality of his teacher, John Mason Duncan, and of his long continued training at a most susceptible age under so forceful a master, certainly, whatever our philosophy of the known facts may be, he was filled with an antipathy to creeds. In a time and climate of theological severity, and amid the rancor of controversy, he was, among his clerical brethren who set higher value than he did, upon "the form of sound words" or logical formulas, verily a pilgrim and stranger upon the earth. He rejoiced to see by faith the day we live in, even the work of the General Assembly, and of the Synods and Presbyteries of 1903.