He excelled in the classics and is said to have already mastered Greek by the time he entered the dissenting academy at Bridgwater, where he was a student of the Rev John Moore (d.1747).

Here he was a contemporary of Bishop Butler and Archbishop Secker, who in spite of their later churchmanship and high preferment remained life-long friends.

[7] In 1725, having read his recently published A Vindication of the Christian Religion, Archbishop Wake wrote to him expressing surprise that 'so much good learning and just reasoning in a person of your profession, and do think it pity you should not rather spend your time in writing books than in selling them'.

[9] 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.

[11] In the introduction to his translation of Philipp van Limborch's Historia Inquistionis (1731) he discusses subscription at some length, where he describes the practice as having 'ever been a Grievance in the Church of God'.

In a number of works published in the 1730s Chandler challenged the penal laws governing Dissenters, which through various tests and subscriptions barred them from full participation in civic life.

[14] By the time he published The Case of Subscription Chandler was expressing his disinclination to engage in any further 'publick Debates concerning Party Affairs'.

Besides ties of friendship, he shared a common outlook with the Latitudinarian leaders of the Anglican Church, and spoke warmly of his relations with them.

To overcome doctrinal objections he suggested that the church's articles by re-written in scriptural language, and that the Athanasian Creed ought to be discarded.

In 1735 he took part in a series of controversial lectures organised by Dissenters at Salters' Hall in London, aimed at what they perceived to be the growing threat of "popery", particularly from missionaries.

These advanced a Protestant ecclesiology over and against claims of Roman supremacy, embodied in Bellarmine's fifteen Marks of the Church.

As well as being accused by Richard Challoner of wilfully misrepresenting Roman Catholicism, Chandler's sermons were among those that drew criticism from Anglicans.

While supportive of his purposes, they took issue with his remarks on the episcopacy ('The Mission of Bishops and Prelates is in itself a trifling Circumstance, of little or not importance...'[19]) and apostolic succession.

Shortly afterwards Chandler joined John Eames and Jeremiah Hunt in talks with two Roman priests at the Bell tavern in Nicholas Lane, London.

In his Biographia Britannica (1778-1793) the minister Andrew Kippis, who worked on some of his literary remains, described Chandler as: '...a man of very extensive learning, and eminent abilities; his apprehension was quick, and his judgement penetrating; he had a warm and vigorous imagination; he was a very instructive and animated preacher; and his talents in the pulpit, and as a writer, procured him very great and general esteem, not only among the Dissenters, but among large numbers of the established Church'[21]In a letter of 1747 Archbishop Herring wrote of Chandler that 'I really affect and honour the man, and wish with all my soul that the Church of England had him; for his spirit and learning are certainly of the first class'.

[22] He had been offered high and lucrative preferment in the Church of England, but chose to remain a Presbyterian to the end of his life on the grounds of conscience.

Amory later wrote a short memoir of Chandler to preface his posthumously published sermons, and together with Nathaniel White replaced him as a co-pastor at the Old Jewry.