For forty-eight years the congregation to which John Chambers ministered had formed an Independent Church. The time had now come when the same company of Christian believers, which had been the Ninth Presbyterian Church, was to enter upon the third stage of its history, and become the Chambers Presbyterian Church.

On the 9th of May, 1825, Mr. Chambers had received his call. Amid all vicissitudes, the removing to a new neighborhood, the building first, and then the enlarging, of the church edifice, the terrible storm of the Civil War, and the removal of a large number of his people elsewhere, nothing had seriously interfered with his work or threatened its stability or continuance, but in 1874 the pastor began to think seriously about the future of his flock. The whole trend of population in all three directions, north, south, and west was away from Broad and Sansom, while business was steadily encroaching upon the neighborhood once wholly occupied by homes. John Chambers had overstepped the limits of three score years and ten. A stroke of paralysis was nature's first warning that the best days of his strength were over. The time seemed now to have come when an independent church, of the type which had for nearly half a century demonstrated its power to live and grow, was no longer needed. It was not self-conceit, but dire necessity that compelled John Chambers to reflect and to ask the question whether, after the removal of his own personality and the snapping by death of the ties which bound three generations to him in love and loyalty, the church could exist as an independent body. Long he pondered the matter. He[138] breathed his thoughts at first to no one, not even to his wife, but looked to God for light. He waited for the vision. While he was musing, the fire burned. He has himself told the story:

"For a whole year I did not even say to the beloved companion of my bosom what my object was, what I was thinking about, but I was casting around to know what was to become of this house. I thought of that little house down at the eastern end of Girard street, where the venerable and godly Samuel Wylie, D.D., lived and preached Jesus Christ, and I remembered the degradation which afterward fell upon it. I remembered the beautiful church on Seventh street, below Arch, where our honored friend, Dr. Beadle, preached, and I remembered that it was converted into a place for negro minstrels. I recollected the house where my once remarkable and eloquent and noble friend, Thomas H. Stockton, preached Christ Jesus, and how it was desecrated from the service of Almighty God to the service of the devil, and I said one morning, as I sat upon the summit of a hill away off yonder in the state of New York, just as the sun was going down, and I looked out upon that beautiful country: 'God helping me, when I go home I will tell my brethren the conclusion I have reached after a whole year's study and thought and prayer.' That conclusion that I had come to was that we would go into the Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, we would change our charter, and we would put this church in such a chartered position that we should never lose it, but it should stand firm and fixed upon the immutable principles of the Lord God, firmly consecrated to the holiness of the atonement and the blood of the saints. We did it. We went into the Presbyterian Church. Those men of God threw their arms around us, almost with shouts of hallelujah, in the room just back of our house. The[139] Presbytery met us and welcomed us, and I had the satisfaction of seeing this church taken into fellowship with that denomination where they are to-day, and where I trust the church will ever abide and prosper under God's b............