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. At the very outset, he disabused his class of the idea that moral philosophy was the same as mental philosophy. Moral philosophy was the science of ethics, the science of duty, and, in his view, it ought to embrace duty in all its relations, and to make use of all the light that could be brought to bear on that high theme. In particular—and here was the peculiar feature of his course—he desired to make the fullest use of what had been communicated on this subject by supernatural revelation. He justified this method of proceeding by an illustration. If natural philosophy were divided into two courses, and if one of them should relate to terrestrial objects and such parts of astronomy as might be prosecuted _without the telescope_, it would be strange indeed were the professor to make no allusion to that instrument, and to ignore, or even repudiate, all the light which it threw on the general scheme of things. So also, in investigating the science of ethics, it would be an extraordinary thing if no use were made of the Christian Revelation, supposing that its authenticity could be established as a revelation from heaven. Natural theology would form an important branch of his subject; but, in its very nature, natural theology was an incomplete and inadequate science. Following the light of nature, it proved the insufficiency of that light; it created the thirst and the longing for more light than it could itself supply. This further light revelation brought in. He held moral philosophy to be the study that ought immediately to precede that of theology; without theology it was incomplete. It would be no part of his course to set forth at full length the evidences for the Christian Revelation, but he would give a general view of them; he would show at least that there was a _primâ facie_ presumption in favour of the divine origin of Christianity; and, therefore, that it was consistent with the principles of the Baconian