this time he continued to preach at Peckham. In 1728 he was appointed pastor at the Old Jewry, the congregation offering him an extra £100 a year on the condition that he give up bookselling. He held this position for the rest of his life. Over time he came to play a leading role in the affairs of London Dissenters. From 1730 he was a member of the Presbyterian Board, and from 1744 of Dr Williams's Trust. It was largely as a result of his influence, particularly among wealthy dissenters, that a relief society for widows and orphaned children of Protestant dissenting ministers was established in 1733. In a similar way he co-ordinated the formation of The Society for the Propagation of the Knowledge of God among the Germans, formed in 1753 to assist German dissenters in the British Colony of Pennsylvania. Beliefs and writings Chandler was an extensive writer, and through his pamphlets, sermons and letters he engaged energetically with the religious disputes of the day. He was an impassioned proponent of civil and religious liberty, advocating freedom of conscience and the appeal to reason in matters of belief. 'Tis with great pleasure, that I observe that the principles of liberty are every day gaining ground, and that a censorious persecuting bigot is now generally looked on with contempt, and treated as a common enemy to mankind. Grave looks, and magisterial dictates must now no longer pass for arguments' (Samuel Chandler, Reflections on the Conduct of Modern Deists, 1727)His work appears to owe a particular debt to the Christian philosopher Samuel Clarke, and stands broadly in the Lockean tradition. Subscription, penal laws and comprehension Theologically Chandler belonged to the liberal wing of Dissent. He believed in the sufficiency of a reasoned approach to Scripture, and was hostile to the claims of human tradition and authority. As such, he was among those who argued against the imposition of creeds or articles of faith as tests of orthodoxy. In the Salters' Hall meetings of 1719, which concerned themselves with subscription to the doctrine of the Trinity, he was among the non-subscribing majority. Chandler's Trinitarian theology is said to have derived from Samuel Clarke's The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), and he is often described as an Arian, or having Arian leanings. In the introduction to his translation of Philipp van Limborch's Historia Inquistionis (1731) he discusses subscription at some length, where