The great Civil War, which divided the nation and the states, families and households, struck the First Independent Church like a hurricane. In a sense, the Scripture was fulfilled as to the smiting of the shepherd and the scattering of the flock. The result was to be a distinct lessening of John Chambers's influence upon the city of Philadelphia, at least, and his relegation to a comparatively limited sphere of influence. One of his alumni writes: "If he had been in sympathy with the North in the Civil War, I believe he would have attained a national reputation. As events turned out, his Southern affiliations and sympathy displaced him somewhat from his niche of peculiar influence in Philadelphia, and relegated him to a work of lessening circumference". The biographer would gladly pass over the whole subject, but true history requires that a just statement of the facts should be given. Whatever be the judgment, all acknowledge that John Chambers acted with a good conscience. _Deo Vindice._ Despite his passionate love of liberty and his democratic sympathies, he had imbibed in Baltimore and held in Pennsylvania the general ideas of the South concerning slavery. This "institution" was considered as orthodoxy itself. It was defended from the pulpit and set forth as divinely ordained. Mr. Chambers sincerely believed that the black man must ever be "a servant of servants unto his brethren". His passionate appeals to the supremacy of the Constitution as against the "higher law", and his hearty profession of admiration for the law-abiding citizen were all on the side of upholding and protecting slavery as an American "institution" to be sacredly safe-guarded. Just before the war, when calling at our home and finding the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" lying upon the sofa and bearing evidences of being well perused, he condemned the reading of such a "vile" work in no measured terms. By nature a sincere man of peace and in practical life a consummate peacemaker, our pastor professed great abhorrence of war. Nevertheless, these denunciations of slaughter and his oft-expressed horror of "brethren imbruing their hands in each other's blood", were discounted in the minds of those who knew his bitter denunciations of all things British and monarchial, and remembered his keen interest in the Mexican war. Some hostile critic of our national policy with Mexico, on seeing the Philadelphia recruits marching away to serve under General Scott, called them "dough faces". Mr. Chambers heard of this and, on the contrary, praising warmly the bold soldier boys of 1846 said that "if the body of the man who had called such soldiers 'dough faces' were made into bread, there wouldn't be a dog in Philadelphia that would eat a pound of it".