Above the level of the floor and middle aisle was a large platform two steps high and probably six or eight feet wide, on which was marshalled the range of chairs for the pastor and his elders, who had ample room on it, even with the communion table set about the middle of the stage. At either end of this platform was a line of pews, five or six in number, at right angles with the eastern wall and entered from the west. In later years, these gave way to a screen of white painted wood and ground glass, covering stairways into the lower room. As for the ceiling, it was truly imposing in its great central countersunk rotunda and depressed squares, which showed how grandly the architect had treated this portion of the edifice.
The cost of the improvements was nearly fifteen thousand dollars, but the number of pews became 242 and the capacity, including the galleries, had increased so as to seat fifteen hundred persons. Nevertheless, for many years, it was not uncommon, as I clearly remember, to pack together under the one roof twenty-five hundred auditors. This was done by sitting and standing, by stowing away the children upon laps and down on hassocks, filling the aisles with seats, having rows of human wall flowers blooming upright all along the gallery, aisles, passage ways, and steps, and by cramming the vestibule, which was often completely occupied by settees or with a standing crowd. Happily no fire broke out or panic ensued during these dangerous jams. After the benediction the trustees, church officers, and boys and men were only too glad to volunteer as ushers, sextons, or laborers. "Amen, Jacob, carry out the benches", was less a jest than a reality which we boys liked. Give a boy some muscular as well as spiritual occupation and he can stand the long services.
The most impressive scenes in the regular church services were those of the last Sundays in March, June, September, and December, when the memorial supper of the Lord, as instituted by Him, was enjoyed. This celebration of Holy Communion was an intensely dramatic as well as a moving scene. Indeed, sometimes, on the highly wrought imagination, and under the melting appeals of the man who saw, felt, and lived the truth, it was powerfully remindful of the ultimate division between the sheep and the goats. All the lower part of the church was reserved for and occupied by the communicants. In addition, as I remember seeing more than once, the aisles were thronged even to the pulpit stairs. Of the thirteen hundred and more members the overwhelming majority was likely to be present at communion seasons. The gallery was reserved and usually filled, yes, often packed, with the "sinners", to whom, in the course of the services, with streaming eyes and imploring hands, John Chambers would make intensely personal and moving appeals, which, perhaps in hundreds of cases, wrought decision. To this day "the galleries" in any edifice have to me a suggestion of impenitence about them. Nevertheless how, and particularly why, as I read, the king was "held captive in the galleries" (Song vii., 5), was utterly beyond my boyish comprehension.
One of these seasons, which marked my own first participation in the sacrament, I well remember, being but fourteen years old, the number uniting at this time being about forty-four. We made two lines along the pew fronts on either side of the aisle.
Another famous occasion was that of June, 1858, in the time of the great revival which swept over the land, and especially Philadelphia. Of seventy new members added, twenty-seven were baptized by the pastor. Of the seventy, sixty-seven were received on first confession of faith after examination and three by letter.
A writer in the Christian Observer of Philadelphia describing the scene, remarks: "The pastor administered the ordinance of baptism. The charges he gave them severally, as he baptized them into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, were various, scriptural, appropriate—words of hallowed counsel, touching the great end of life—are never to be forgotten. As the seventy stood before that immense audience, professing their faith in Christ, their ever living, reigning Saviour, and as the pastor addressed them and the large assembly of communicants in words of life and truth, in which all seemed to feel a living interest, the scene was solemn, grand, and glorious. We were ready to exclaim: 'This is none other but the house of God and this is the gate of Heaven'. The distribution of the bread and the wine to the thousand or twelve hundred communicants occupied nearly an hour. The church was then briefly addressed by Dr. Converse and again by the pastor. All were reminded that as members of the church they were not their own; they had been bought with a price; redeemed not with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ".
On his fiftieth anniversary, Dr. Chambers said: "The ordinance of the Lord's Supper has been administered every quarter of a year for the last fifty years, and there has been but one communion during the whole time when there were not additions, and that was one of the quarters when I was in Europe. We have never received at any single time fewer than seven, and no more at one time than one hundred and twenty to the communion. I state these facts that you see how good God has been to us, and how great our debt is."
I am very frank to say that, as a small boy, the moment of dismission from the church service, after three hours indoors, was a very happy one, and the event usually awaited with pleasure as the crowning circumstance of the function. Truth compels me to state that my facility and celerity in covering the distance along the north side aisle, between the pew door and the vestibule, was something that often amazed my elders. Our pew was third from the front, but I reached the doorway, not wholly out of breath, nor usually mixed up in the crowd. I always did have an admiration for Elijah who could outrun Ahab's chariot and horses. The truth also compels me to add that my idea of happiness, at 12 M., was to join that amazingly large "curbstone committee" of boys and men, often three or four deep, which gathered on the edge of the pavement, among and in front of the "tree boxes"—for Broad Street was lined with trees then—in order to see the thousand or more people come out of the vestibule and down two sets of steps to the pavement. This was the time when, in my eyes, young girls were the prettiest,—even more than they have ever been since, and nearly everything in the world was usually bright and glorious, even though I had many boyish sorrows unknown to the world. I must be self-righteous to confess that often it chanced, that while I had been genuinely "at church" and inside of it, not a few of the "curbstone committee" were young men (with some older ones) who had not been in church at all, but had come to escort the pretty girls home, or to meet their friends; though of course the great majority around the "tree boxes" had been listeners, if not worshippers within. Usually on the large stone platform, between the entrance door and the columns, the pleasant friendly interviews and final handshakes with pastor and parishioners and friends in general, took place.
It was about half past twelve when we arrived home, on Twentieth street four doors south of Chestnut. Father, mother and seven children, the normal family, and often with guests, enjoyed, after due thanks to God, the bountiful fare, and the one hour of the week when the head of the house was present at the mid-day meal. Then about 1:40 P.M., we were off again to Sunday School which opened at two o'clock, and which once a month took the form of a Temperance or a Missionary meeting. At times, besides the appropriate singing and special addresses, often from the Master's envoys abroad, but home on a furlough, we had the missionary news from all parts of the world read to us. I remember particularly the presence and words of two Christian Indians from Kansas. One speaker, among many, whom I well remember hearing, was Rev. Wilder, the founder of the Week of Prayer. Among other enterprises, in which my boyish energies were enlisted, was that of securing contributions in money for the equivalent of one or more bricks in the American Sunday School Union building on Chestnut Street. Another was the financing of two and a half shares in the missionary ship Morning Star. I remember how the pastor thrilled us with the news of the Reed treaty of 1858, saying "China is open to the gospel". The Yedo embassy of 1861, giving me my first sight of men from the Mikado's empire—and especially as I saw "Tommy" and others at short range on Chestnut street—powerfully impressed my imagination. I little knew at the time that I should be an educational pioneer in the then distant archipelago.[8]