The religion of these pioneers may have been narrow, but it was strong and deep. It was based on a first-hand knowledge of the English Bible. Even in his early life, as I remember Mr. Chambers saying, he revolted against bigotry and the kind of religion that was not rich in love to one's neighbor. These were psalm-singers and not hymn-using Christians, but the Methodist preachers and Christians of other sorts than Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were in the land. The boy John once heard an old gentleman say that he would as soon sit down to the Lord's Supper with a horse-thief, as with a man who sang Dr. Watts' version of the Psalms. Little John also refused to touch liquor, for he saw the awful effects of its use, and grew to have a hatred of it. On one occasion, the little fellow rebuked a crowd of men, including his own father, for their drinking habits whereby the parent, William Chambers was greatly affected. "The heart of the child three years old is in the heart of the sage of sixty," as says the Japanese proverb, was true of John Chambers, the metropolitan preacher, but it was in childhood that God began to shape this bonnie bairn for a long life of usefulness. The boy in the Ohio forests was a hearty hater of all bickering and squabbling. He was often called upon to settle differences. He came to be known among neighbors and friends as "the little peacemaker." "The child is father to the man," and all his life John Chambers was mighty as a reconciler. John Chambers's boyhood was thus spent in the wilderness in continuous hard work, by which he toughened his thews and kept his cheeks rosy, rising into brave, pure, and clean manhood. He took his part in the hard work of the farm, even to clearing the forest. He knew what it was to "lift up axes against thick trees." With his other brothers and sisters, he enjoyed life to the full. Politically, in this Jeffersonian era, his parents took the Democratic view of things, so that their offspring had the spirit of democracy in their veins. All his life the intensely patriotic John followed the faith of his father, and was, as he called himself, a Constitutional State-Rights Democrat. He was taught to read and write at home, but with that true instinct for education, which is inborn with Calvinists and the Scotch-Irishmen, his parents wished to have him better educated. They sent him, therefore, when he was but fifteen years of age, to Baltimore, where lived some of their relatives. A journey over the mountains in the early nineteenth century was like a trip to the Philippines in our days, but John gladly set out on horseback, with a party, in the spring of 1813, to the city on the Patapsco.