“When Dr. Chalmers occupied the chair of philosophy in the College of St. Andrews, he used to gather into his house on a Sabbath evening, the poorest and the most ignorant of the vagrant children of the neighbourhood. His biography states that for that audience, he prepared himself (with pen in hand) as carefully as for any class in the university.
Likewise, on a winter's day, through frost and in the face of a driving snow-storm, you might have seen him trudging five miles to fulfil an appointment of religious worship with a little company of rustic people at Kilmany. There amid some illiterate shivering cottagers, too few for a church building or chapel, and met in a damp room – a congregation that many men would have thought it expedient to dismiss at once 'On account of the weather' or would have put off with some crude, unpremeditated talk – he preached as laboured and eloquent a sermon as would have moved to rapture and wonder the learning and fashion of Glasgow or London”.