The change became very apparent in his ministerial work. He threw new ardour into the visitation of his flock and the instruction of the young. His preaching passed into those evangelical lines which formerly he had treated with contempt. Family worship, morning and evening, was regularly conducted in the manse, although sometimes it was a great trial to introduce that much contemned practice when a guest was present who had little sympathy with the evangelical life. A Bible Society was established in the parish, and all the people were exhorted to join it. Strangers flocked to his church, not merely as of old to enjoy his eloquent and impassioned delivery, but for guidance and aid in the service of God. Converts to living Christianity gladdened his heart and aided him in his work. ’Sandy Paterson,’ his first convert, became a great and earnest worker among his neighbours, and afterwards, as a city missionary, in the Canongate of Edinburgh, successfully laboured in the slums. With a young gentleman in Dundee, Mr. James Anderson, Chalmers formed a remarkable friendship on the basis of their mutual interest in religion, and in his great humility corresponded with him more like a fellow-student or brother than a spiritual father. And Chalmers himself became an earnest and laborious student of the Bible; and, in order to keep up the glow of his spiritual life, instituted for himself a monthly exercise, in which he reviewed before God the work of the month, and with much confession and thanksgiving, implored the blessing of God on all his work and on all his people. No man was more sensible than himself of the great difference between his earlier and later ministry. He told his people that earnest though he had been at first in pressing honour, truth, and integrity upon them, he never once heard of any resulting reformation; all his vehemence had not the weight of a feather on their moral habits. It was only after he became acquainted with the true way of approach to God, and the real fountain of divine strength in Christ, that those minor reformations showed themselves as the result of that deeper and more vital process by which the heart was changed. It was his delight to hear masters testifying to the scrupulous honesty and conscientious fidelity of their servants, after they had come under the power of the Gospel. He prayed that such servants, while thus adorning the doctrine of God their Saviour, humble though they were, might reclaim the great ones of the land to the acknowledgment of the faith.