When the meetings closed they left to attend Transylvania Presbytery at Danville. There he met again an old acquaintance, Robert Marshall, who when a boy of sixteen had been wounded in the battle of Monmouth and had come home with Colonel Campbell to rest and grow strong again. Several months before he had moved from Virginia to Kentucky. After the Presbytery adjourned the three went to Lexington and John filled Father Rice’s pulpit. The Lexington Gazette made favorable mention of his sermon: “Calvin Campbell, the young mountain preacher, who lives at Campbell Station and is a descendant of the Campbells of Scotland, filled Father Rice’s pulpit last Sunday and preached one of the greatest sermons ever heard in Lexington. “In a voice of great compass and power, without strain or apparent mental effort, and in a deft, finished and homiletic style, plain to all in its perfectness, he made plain the most difficult of truths; dwelling upon scriptural interpretation rather than doctrinal theme. All who heard him were captivated by his magnetism and convinced by his earnest spirituality. We have never before heard a preacher who could picture the life and mission of the Saviour so effectively, or who by apt lessons from the parables makes the truths they teach so personal to each hearer.” The following Sunday John preached in Danville, where he had many friends and acquaintances. A great crowd came to hear him. It was here he had gone to the seminary, had married Dorothy Fairfax and at the political club had answered most convincingly, considering his age, General Wilkinson’s then popular argument. His sermon which follows indicates his liberal, and as Father Rice felt tempted to say, his almost unorthodox views. Making the World Christian. “Christianity is the development of a great universal partnership, organized for the redemption of man, between God in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and man; in which man before Abraham, and Abraham, Moses, Paul, Augustine, Savonarola and Luther have participated and men yet unborn will participate. “Though light was the first thing God made, man to shut out light draws closely about his eyes the curtains of conceit and prejudice. The white man, defining his God as a spirit, in his conceit says, he has a material white body and I am made in his image; while the red man gives to his god, a spirit, at times a material red body. This is logical in that if God, a spirit, sees fit to appear to man, or if man appears to see God, it will be in the highest comprehensive form known to man.