CHANDLER, Dr. Samuel, a learned Dissenting minister, was born in 1693, at Hungerford, Berkshire, where his father was an eminent nonconformist minister. In an academy at Gloucester, conducted by Mr Samuel Jones, he contracted a friendship with Butler, afterwards bishop of Durham, and Secker, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, which continued to the end of their lives.
Mr Chandler began to preach about July 1714; and being soon distinguished by his talents in the pulpit, was chosen in 1716 minister of the Presbyterian congregation at Peckham. Here he married; but having lost, by the fatal South Sea scheme, the whole of his wife's fortune, he was compelled to open a book shop in the Poultry, which he kept for two or three years, still continuing to discharge his pastoral duties. He also held, alternately with Dr Lardner, a winter weekly evening lecture at the meeting-house in the
Old Jewry; where he was first settled as assistant preacher, and then as pastor. Here, for forty years, he ministered to a very respectable congregation with great success; and devoted the intervals of leisure to writing on a variety of important subjects. While he was thus employed, the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen conferred on him the degree of doctor in divinity, and he received offers of high preferment in the Established church, which he nobly declined. He had likewise the honour of being elected fellow of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies.
On the death of George II. in 1760, Dr Chandler published a sermon on that event, in which he compared King George to King David. This called forth a pamphlet entitled The History of the Man after God's own Heart; in which the author—resuscitating the article of Bayle—exhibited king David as an example of perfidy, lust, and cruelty; and complained of the insult offered to the memory of the late British monarch by Dr Chandler's parallel. This attack determined Dr Chandler to publish an immediate reply in the following year; and also to prepare a more elaborate work, which was afterwards published in two volumes 8vo, entitled A Critical History of the Life of David, &c.; refuting the objections of Bayle, and satisfactorily expounding his penitential psalms. This, the last and perhaps the best of Dr Chandler's productions, had been printed off just before the author's death, which took place May 8, 1766.
Dr Chandler was a man of very extensive learning and eminent abilities; and his talents, both in the pulpit and as a writer, procured him very great and general esteem.
In 1768 four volumes of his sermons were published by Dr Amory, according to his own directions in his last will. In 1777 another work of his was published in one volume 4to:—A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, with doctrinal and practical Observations; together with a critical and practical Commentary on the two Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians.