The Assembly is past, but the time of rest has not yet come. Dr. Chalmers hurries back to Glasgow. Now that he has got breathing-time, his heart returns to the great experiment which he had begun there, and an unrestrainable eagerness takes possession of him to help it on. The next six weeks are spent in incessant labour in the old field. In looking back on this period he remarked in his peculiar phraseology, 'I think that I never spent a season of more crowded occupancy.' On his way to Glasgow he took Perth, where he preached a missionary sermon on a week-day, the collection amounting to L81, 8s. In Glasgow he preached steadily in the chapel of ease, and he had the great satisfaction, though of course it was but a temporary one, of adding four hundred to the sittings let, no doubt to accommodate the many persons who were bent on hearing him during the few weeks of his stay. During these six weeks he preached ten times in the chapel, writing all the lectures, and apparently the sermons too--seven of his texts being from the Epistle to the Romans, part of the exposition afterwards published. Apart from spiritual impulse and spiritual fruit, his six weeks in Glasgow benefited the chapel to the tune of L200. In the midst of his incessant public work he contrived to write to his wife a full journal of all his proceedings, and he gave her most explicit instructions to give the children a feast of strawberries on the arrival of each letter, and to let them know that they were from him. With all his greatness and eloquence, it is amusing to find him showing that nervousness in the prospect of a speech at a public dinner which but few men have been able to overcome. 'It kept me anxious all day.' One is reminded of Sir Robert Peel, who could hardly eat anything at public dinners when a speech was forthcoming, but sat in misery, crumbling his bread. 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.'
A source of greater trouble and annoyance arose after his Glasgow visit in connection with a promise to deliver a missionary sermon at Stockton, near Manchester. After his arrival, he found that an advertisement had been issued from which it appeared that the sermon would come in as a sort of interlude in a vast musical entertainment, in which an orchestra of at least a hundred persons, supported by drums, trumpets, bassoon, organ, serpents, violins without number, violoncellos, bass viols, flutes, and hautboys would take part. Chalmers was most indignant. He felt it an affront to himself, to be stuck up like a mountebank, as if he had come to help in the entertainment of a pleasure-seeking audience. But not less did he feel it a prostitution of his office, as if the Ambassador of Heaven, dealing with men on their state before God and their need of reconciliation, were to be mixed up with such a clatter. He was on the verge of refusing to preach at all. But remembering his promise, he compromised the matter by refusing to appear except at the time when his sermon was delivered. 'I stopped in the minister's room till it was all over. Went to the pulpit, prayed, preached, retired during the time of the collection, and again prayed. Before I left my own private room, they fell too again, with most tremendous fury, and the likest thing to it which I recollect is a great military band on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.' In spite of all, the collection exceeded L400. In telling the story, as he often did to his friends, he said that they hardly let him alone even while he was preaching; 'the fellows were tuning their trombones in my very ear.'
November 1825 found him again at his work in St. Andrews, with a better prepared course, and a very numerous class. Notwithstanding the labours of the recess, no symptom of exhaustion appeared; on the contrary, he seemed to thirst for further labour, and whereas the subject of political economy had been considered to fall to the professor of moral philosophy, he intimated that in the following session he would make political economy the subject of a separate course. A numerous class was enrolled, but instead of teaching the subject by lectures, he treated it by means of a text-book. The text-book was Dr. Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, on portions of which the students were examined, the professor occasionally adding explanations or little dissertations of his own, or referring to more modern books which gave the latest aspects of the subject.