vice in his
place in the College chapel (as in his absent way he might no doubt be
prone to do); and it is even stated by Ramsay that he petitioned the
Senatus on his first appointment in Glasgow to be relieved of the duty
of opening his class with prayer, and the petition was rejected; that
his opening prayers were always thought to "savour strongly of natural
religion"; that his lectures on natural theology were too flattering
to human pride, and induced "presumptuous striplings to draw an
unwarranted conclusion, viz. that the great truths of theology,
together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may
be discovered by the light of nature without any special
revelation,"[50] as if it were a fault to show religious truth to be
natural, for fear young men should believe it too easily. No record of
the alleged petition about the opening prayers and its refusal remains
in the College minutes, and the story is probably nothing but a morsel
of idle gossip unworthy of attention, except as an indication of the
atmosphere of jealous and censorious theological vigilance in which
Smith and his brother professors were then obliged to do their work.

In his lectures on jurisprudence and politics he had taught the
doctrine of free trade from the first, and not the least remarkable
result of his thirteen years' work in Glasgow was that before he left
he had practically converted that city to his views. Dugald Stewart
was explicitly informed by Mr. James Ritchie, one of the most eminent
Clyde merchants of that time, that Smith had, during his
professorship in Glasgow, made many of the leading men of the place
convinced proselytes of free trade principles.[51] Sir James Steuart
of Coltness, the well-known economist, used, after his return from his
long political exile in 1763, to take a great practical interest in
trying to enlighten his Glasgow neighbours on the economical problems
that were rising about them, and having embraced the dying cause in
economics as well as in politics, he sought hard to enlist them in
favour of protection, but he frankly confesses that he grew sick of
repeating arguments for protection to these "Glasgow theorists," as he
calls them, because he found that Smith had already succeeded in
persuading them completely in favour of a free importation of
corn.[52] Sir James Steuart was a most persuasive talker; Smith
himself said he understood Sir James's system better from his talk
than from