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 £400. 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. It should be added that Dr. Chalmers always opened his class with prayer. This was an innovation in a class of philosophy. The prayers were short and pithy, often bearing on the subject of the preceding lecture, and the language was often felicitous, and even sublime. Of the like quality were the prayers he offered when he became a professor of divinity. Many of these will be found in the _Institutes of Theology_.