Henry, the second son of Patrick Scougal, bishop of Aberdeen, was born in June 1650, at Salton, in East Lothian, where his father, the immediate predecessor of Bishop Burnet, was rector. At the age of fifteen he entered the university, where he behaved with great modesty, sobriety, and diligence. No sooner had he finished his course of education, than he was promoted to a professorship in the university of Aberdeen, where he conscientiously performed his duty in training up the youth under his care in such principles of learning and virtue as might render them ornaments to church and state. Having been professor of philosophy for four years, he was at the age of twenty-three ordained a minister, and settled at Auchterless, a small village about twenty miles from Aberdeen. About the twenty-seventh year of his age he fell into consumption, which by slow degrees wasted him away. Upon the twentieth day of June 1678 he died, in the greatest calmness, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, and was buried in the King's College church in Old Aberdeen. His principal work is a small treatise entitled the Life of God in the Soul of Man. This book is not only valuable for the sublime spirit of piety which it breathes, but for the purity and elegance of its style; qualities for which few English writers were distinguished before the revolution.