One great landmark in John Chambers's life was his visit to Europe in 1830. His excessive labors and long-continued use of his voice in public discourse compelled him to cease both preaching and pastoral work. As he said in 1875:
"In the year 1830 I lost my voice so that I could not have been heard twenty paces from where I am now if you had given me the world. My physician ordered me away and I was gone fourteen months. When the announcement was made to my brethren that I had to go they instantly made arrangements. They put into my purse twenty-five hundred dollars, and into the hand of my dear friend and brother, Rev. Dr. Ludlow, the father of Judge Ludlow, one thousand dollars to preach on the Sabbath for one year, making thirty-five hundred dollars down at once. It was a noble and generous act on their part".
Such generosity was as surprising to the young pastor as it was creditable to the people themselves. To see the great ocean and the Old World at a time of the fullness of his manly vigor and professional success, travelling in a first-class steamer, compelled contrast with his first crossing of the ocean as a helpless baby and with a father who was an exile and political refugee. In England he was so fortunate as to see the royal maiden who had just been in 1830 made heiress presumptive to the Crown on the accession of William IV. Possibly it was at this time that he made the acquaintance of Richard Vaux, then secretary of the American legation, whom I remember well in his later life as a prominent Democratic politician and mayor of the city of Philadelphia. With his long, flowing, curled hair,—pronounced dress and astonishing necktie, Mr. Vaux was a picturesque figure in the Quaker City. He often boasted of having danced with the lady who became Queen Victoria, though this was before she assumed the crown on June 28th, 1838. While in Scotland Mr. Chambers visited the Free Mason's lodges and enjoyed the mysteries of the Scottish rite. In Ireland he visited his native place, Stewartstown, the house in which he was born, and the prison in which his father had been incarcerated and from which he escaped. He was absent in all fourteen months, and came back refreshed in body and enlarged in mind.
In physical righteousness John Chambers stood before his boys and young men as an inspiring exemplar. He neither "drank, chewed, smoked, or swore." For fifty years he put to confusion those who preached the necessity or justified the use of alcohol or tobacco. Over six feet high, in superb health and vigor, always invitingly clean in person, he reinforced every day the teaching of good fathers and mothers who strove to lead their sons to noble manhood.
CHAPTER IX.
THE MASTER OF HEARTS.
In John Chambers, sanctified common sense was combined with spiritual fervor. As a young pastor, he had right ideas about finance and the honest support of a church. Money was needed for the salaries and expenses of keeping the edifice comfortable and in repair. Before the first year had passed by, it was evident to the "Chamberites", that a new building would be necessary, even if the law suit had gone in their favor. The voices of the croakers and prophets of evil, at first loud and thunderous, had sunk to the "peep and mutter" stage and were rapidly approaching silence.
In a new field, larger financial resources would be necessary, but from the first, only manly, honorable, and truly scriptural methods of providing revenue were employed. Never in all the history of the First Independent Church was there a fair or supper to which admittance was charged. Those methods of raising money, too often associated with religious societies, to the scandal of faith, the equipment of the jester, and the furnishing of the ungodly with excuse for self-righteousness, were tabooed by Mr. Chambers. He believed both that the laborer was worthy of his hire, and that men ought to pay for their religious privileges. He was so successful in this policy that within six years, having paid all debts, his people in the spring of 1830 bought at Broad and George (now Sansom) streets, that lot of land for four hundred dollars, which afterwards was sold for over four hundred thousand dollars. The land and house of worship, the subsequent enlargement and repairs, as well as the running expenses of the church, so long as it was independent, were paid for by subscriptions. "We have never in our lives," said John Chambers in 1875, "gone abroad for means to help us."
The region west of Broad street was then "out in the country". Green fields, or vacant lots, stretched to the Schuylkill River. At Broad and Market were the Water Works. When afterwards these were removed and the pumps and reservoir were established at Fairmount, four small parks, with their trees and green sward, made one of the city's breathing spaces. Even then Broad Street was considered the western boundary of the city of Philadelphia.