John Chambers

hestnut Street is the Quaker City's most brilliant thoroughfare, stretching between the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Those who traverse ei

and peak of metal is visible the bronze statue of William Penn, founder of the City of Brotherly Love. Though this

s, even unto the third and fourth generation of its citizens, is John Chambers. During forty-eight years he was pastor of the First Inde

tously does memory find here a sermon in stone and a stimulus in architecture. Indeed, a former worshipper walking on the[2] other side of the street, who chanced to look no higher than the old familiar altitudes, might imagine that the house of prayer, with its Ionic columns, still s

on high square bases, supporting a simple but imposing pediment, there are to-day eig

hich newspaper and which pulpit. It is certain that in the eyes of some, printing machinery and type, and daily square miles of inked paper, for which whole forests have been destroyed, have more moral potency than worship, prayer, and preaching. Yet against this modern parable of the mustard seed become a tree, phenomenal and imposing, we have happily also the Master's parable of the leaven, or of might

inating and beautiful with boyhood's memories, let us stop to recall the past. Let us think of that busy and potent life of John Chambers (1797-1875), and of that First Independent Church (1825-1873), which, like a spiritual storage battery, still supplies the power that pulses in many thousand souls. Man and edifice, though vanished from e

val. It was an old-timer, battered, rubbed, and chipped. Evidently it had once been a hitching post. Then, after sundry paintings and daubings, it had served for various advertising purposes, setting forth the changing business carried on in the dwelling place itself, in front of which it stood, or, in the cellar of the

John Chambers, master of hearts and transformer of human lives, wrought and taught. Within its now vanished walls the sunny pastor, the shining ornament in social life, the soul-stirring preacher, the unquailing s

ohn Chambers and the First Independent Church of Philadelphia, which is almost forgotten before a brood of lusty children and vigorous grandchildren that now tra

ayer, whose life was saved. Those who carried out her purpose were Irish refugees, seeking freedom in America.[5] Being intense Sabbatarians, they would have no sound of passing wheel or hoof on the Lord's Day, for theirs was the age, also, of Delaware river cobble stones, and of iron tires. No pneumatic or sound deadening rubber-swathed wheels existed then. Hence, to warn off all matutinal disturbers of the solemnity of worship, and evening passers o

increased. In time not a single street running north or south, even in case of a fire, was open to the firemen, who were apt to make quick work in removing obstacles. A snow storm of petitions, for and against the repeal of the Acts of 17

it lives. Like Huldah's home, our old church in its "second quarter" was a "college," and, fellow alumni, we shall try to tell the story[6] of our Alma Mater, "mother of us all," and sketch the life and work of the great and good man, with whom the First Independent Church

Sunday-school and the Bethany Presbyterian Church; the John Chambers Memorial Church, an offshoot and outgrowth from the Bethany Church; the Presbyterian Church at Rutledge, Pa.; the St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in West Philadelphia; and the magnifi

eetings before 1840, sustained chiefly by John Chambers' young men? Shall we hint at the missionary and educational impulses given at "the ends of the earth" b

would say, "Not unto us O Lord, not unto us, but unto t

Frustra.