1823-1828
On the 9th November 1823 Dr. Chalmers preached his farewell sermon at Glasgow, and on Friday the 14th he delivered his introductory lecture at St. Andrews. He had not a single day of rest between the toils of the office he laid down and those of the office he took up. Four of his most esteemed Glasgow friends had accompanied him to St. Andrews in token of gratitude for the past and good-will for the future. At first Dr. Chalmers was alone, and for a time he was the guest of his old friend, Professor Duncan. It was not till the beginning of 1824 that Mrs. Chalmers and his children joined him.
St. Andrews had been familiar to him from his boyhood, and its historical associations had dawned on him gradually, but with a firm hold, as such things usually impress boys. Its traditions went back to a remote antiquity. Fordun's legend of the Greek saint, Regulus, being ordered by the Lord to carry the bones of St. Andrew into the 'north-west corner of the earth,' was too obviously the offspring of superstition to be much regarded; yet it seemed to indicate that the 'East Nook' was one of the earliest seats of Christianity in Scotland. In pre-Reformation times St. Andrews had been the headquarters of the Roman Church, and, under successive archbishops, Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart had been burnt at the stake for their noble testimony to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Before their day, Peter Craw, a Bohemian, and thus of the same stock as the Moravian Church for which Dr. Chalmers always had a very special regard, and other witnesses for the truth had perished in the flames. It was here that John Knox first opened his mouth as a preacher; hither, too, he retired for a time at the close of his life, and preached in the church when danger threatened him in the metropolis. Here, also, Andrew and James Melville, Robert Rollok, Robert Bruce, Robert Blair, Samuel Rutherford, Thomas Halyburton, and many other familiar names in the history of the country, had gathered wisdom as students, or imparted it as professors, or as ministers of the Gospel. The first university in Scotland had been set up at St. Andrews, and men like Buchanan and Melville had made it illustrious by their learning. Nor was it very long since Chalmers himself had found the powers of his intellect awakened as he sat in its mathematical class-room. It must have been with no ordinary feelings that he returned as a professor to his _Alma Mater_, and girded himself for the duty of influencing its students; not, however, in the spirit or with the aims of his early years, but under the influence of those intense evangelical convictions that, twelve years before, had revolutionised his soul.
During the first session, in preparing his lectures, he was truly from hand to mouth; to be but a few days in advance of the time for their delivery was all that he could achieve. His second session, 1824-25, was regarded as the most brilliant in his academic career. The number of students was more than double what it had ever been in former years, and the enthusiasm was intense. Chalmers was well aware of the fear entertained in some quarters that, amid the blaze of his popular eloquence, he would not be able to attain to an academic level in the more solid qualities of thinking and exposition of thought, appropriate to a university. But in point of fact there was more than enough of solid thought and ingenious speculation in his lectures to do away with any such impression. Eloquent they often were, nor did he scorn the aid of imagination and illustration in handling the topics of his course; but his main object was to exercise the minds of his students, and to set them thinking upon his themes.