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.