A CARD FROM THE REV. JOHN CHAMBERS.
"For many days my mind has been exercised how I could in the most Christian and modest way reach the eye and ear of a very large number of friends whose solicitude for my restoration to health and continued life has been so marked. I have concluded that a simple card, sent out through the press, from an honest heart, would be acceptable to all.
First, then, I owe a debt of undying gratitude to the Ministers of the Prince of Peace, who came like doves to the windows of my tabernacle with the inquiry late and early: 'How is he; any change for the better?'
Again my gratitude is due to a large number of God's Israel, who called again and again without any other object than to know whether the light was beginning to burn brighter in the house of sorrow. How Christian-like was this!
Then, again, I wish to acknowledge, as best I can, my debt of gratitude to that large class of my fellow-citizens, beginning with the learned jurist and reaching down to the humblest man of toil. In this enumeration I take more than ordinary pleasure in including a large number of the Society of Friends, especially the members of the Twelfth Street Meeting. While memory lasts those fond inquiries of old and young will not be forgotten. Kind words never die. As to my own beloved people I may say of them, as Jesus said of the faithful woman: 'They have done what they could'. There has been nothing left undone to relieve the anxiety of a pastor's heart.
The Press, too, has been most kind and generous, for which I thank them. Nor can I pass unnoticed the eminent services of my physician, S. Weir Mitchell, M.D., whose skill and devotion, under God, have brought me into a state of convalescence.
Glorious Christianity! How unlike all other systems of religion.
John Chambers.
Philadelphia, March 28, 1871."
On reaching his seventy-sixth year, in 1874, the young people of the congregation planned a delightful surprise, of which he thus told, at the semi-centennial of his pastorate: "They converted these two figures '7—6' into gold dollars, and they presented me the '76' beautifully made up of gold dollars, containing one hundred and eleven in all."
"The glory of young men is their strength" and hope. It would hardly be fair to expect an old man of seventy-two, who had borne the heat and burden of the day, and was already broken in health and by many sorrows, to feel as hopeful and buoyant concerning things at the end of the earth as a young man not yet thirty. Yet none more than himself felt humiliated and took rebukes gladly, when he realized that he had not honored his Master by as large a measure of faith as he ought to have done.
Late in 1870, just before leaving for Japan, to which country I had been invited by the lord of Echizen, to organize the education of the lads of his province according to Occidental principles and in modern methods,[10] I called on my old pastor to receive his blessing and take farewell. Always hearty in his welcome and kindly in his interest, I felt that his faith was not as strong concerning the educational and missionary conquest of the Far East, as his preaching and long-continued interest had led me to expect. As with the war for freedom and national life, so in the war for the Everlasting Kingdom, it seemed to me he took a too local view of a great subject. I was genuinely surprised that, instead of heartily cheering me, he seemed to discourage me. He spoke gloomily of the vast masses of untouched heathenism and said that anything I could do was only as a drop in the bucket.
[10] See Verbeck of Japan, Chapter XI.
Nevertheless, by the grace of God, I intended to make that drop tell, and I felt that what man could not do, God would. I entered the Japan, in which no native Christian dared then to make confession of his faith, in which no more converts to Reformed Christianity than could be enumerated on the fingers of one hand were known, and in which descendants of the Roman Catholics of the early seventeenth century were still in the crypts, undiscovered yet, even by the French missionaries then on the soil. At that time, 1870, feudalism with its mediæval ideals was the rule of society. A half dozen government schools on Western principles, and only one or two of missionary origin, were in their infancy. I went out to live four years in the East, one of them as a lone exile in Fukui. This was the Japan which Verbeck, Brown, and Hepburn by Christian teaching and healing, which Satow, Aston, and Chamberlin through scholarship, and which Kido, Okubo, and Iwakura by political action were reconstructing, and where all the fascinations and horrors of the pagan world were rampant. No life insurance company in America would then insure my life, except at a heavy premium.
When I came back home in 1874, and in the still grandly attended Friday night meeting spoke to Dr. Chambers' people, I told them of Christian churches with nearly a thousand members enrolled, of Christian schools and hospitals, and of a new Japan. I called the attention of the now venerable pastor to this fresh illustration of the truth he had so often proclaimed, how much greater God was than our feeble faith, and how superbly the kingdom of heaven was marching on. After the benediction, a hearty right hand shaken and left shoulder patted in the ancient style, with words of glowing friendship, made for my soul a picture set in diamonds of delight—the last of the great man that has framed itself in my memory.