The pastor, elect and ordained, brought his bride to Philadelphia and took a house on Thirteenth street, below Walnut, and there began his home. Being on the same street as his church, he had not been many months at work before scores of people living on Thirteenth, or streets parallel and crossing it, were attracted to become worshippers with him as their pastor. As one lady, still lovely in her eighty years of life, tells the story from girlhood's memories, the "Chamberites", as they were at first called, were every Sunday morning seen to be moving with their faces set northward toward "the Church of the Vow"; and the preacher, being from the first the soul of promptness, "led the procession".
Between Thirteenth and Broad streets and Walnut and Locust, had grown up "the Village", where for lack of accommodation in the church edifice, the Sunday School was established. On Sabbath afternoons, the whole school adjourned bodily to the church, walking up Thirteenth street to Filbert.
Yet even with a growing Sunday School and enlarging church membership, the way of the young pastor was far from smooth, and the First Independent Church of Philadelphia was in no danger of being smothered with kindness. Almost as a matter of course, an industrious army of prophets arose to foretell failure to a church founded on the Bible alone. Rather, instead of "prophets", we should say a busy host of fortune-tellers, since the Hebrew and Biblical word, prophet, does not mean predicter, but the utterer of truth. The little ecclesiastical infant, rather foundling, needed much warmth of prayer and devotion, certainly during its first decade. With shakings of the head and emphatic use of the hands in dreadful warning of calamity, the Philadelphia variety of soothsayers declared that in two or three years, the First Independent Church would go to pieces. Both laymen and ministers were loud in declaring that such a church, without a "creed," (though the Bible is a very library of creeds), could not thrive or live. The idea of success in rearing a church, with the Holy Scriptures only as a rule of faith and practice, was scoffed at. In our day, it does indeed seem strange that Protestant ministers should so talk, but experience, the great teacher, showed "the divine sufficiency of the Bible as a rule of faith and practice, and ... also a bond of union holding together a large and flourishing congregation in Christian love and harmony". So wrote John Chambers in 1859.
However, "liberal", or, rather scriptural, in his theological opinions, the young minister was, since especially he cared nothing for any man's boasted "predestination" or "election" to eternal life, unless that same man showed the fruits of faith in holy living, he was anything but liberal in his ideas of morals, or as related to amusements, or the keeping of the Christian day of rest. We shall see this clearly when we note how he dealt with one of his theatre-going elders.
In his fortieth anniversary sermon, May 14th, 1865, which was printed, Mr. Chambers referred to this experience, stating that during the two-score years of his ministry no word of disagreement, or of an unpleasant character with his fellow-presbyters, had ever been spoken, with the exception that we are about to describe, and which, in order to make a perfectly correct record, Mr. Chambers himself would not omit.
Shortly after administering his first communion, the young pastor found that "one of the original elders was in the habit of attending theatrical amusements and of taking his children with him". What resulted from this discovery is given in his own words:
"This conduct was so directly in opposition to what were then my convictions of what was right, and which opinion I still hold—so directly in the face of the teachings of the Bible, that I could not remain silent under it, but at once sought Mr. ——, in order that we might have a mutual explanation of our views. Upon my putting the question to him, as to whether he thought his course was a proper one—whether it was the love of Christ which induced him to frequent such places, and if in so doing he was bringing up his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord by making them his companions on such occasions, I found that he was obstinate in his determination to adhere to his own course of action. I referred him to Second Corinthians, sixth chapter, fourteenth to eighteenth verse, and then told him that I could not and would not serve with him in the Session; that either he or I must resign, and proposed that it should be left to the vote of the Church. If the Church advocated or permitted indulgence in theatrical amusements, if it was considered a means of grace and the proper school in which children were to be trained up for God, there was
but one path for me to pursue—to dissolve my connection with them at once. If on the contrary they sustained me in my views, Mr. —— must resign. He was unwilling to submit the matter to the vote of the congregation, knowing only too well that their standard of piety was a high one, and that his conduct would meet with their severe displeasure. Consequently he resigned his office of elder in the spring of 1826, and from that day to this neither elder nor lay member has advocated visits to the theatre as the way to heaven, and I am sure with the Bible as their rule of life, never will".
JOHN CHAMBERS.