PREMIER, a French Protestant divine of considerable note in his day as a controversialist, was born in 1637 at Mer in Orléanais. Trained at the academy of Samur, he was sent to Holland, and afterwards to England to finish his studies. Returning home, he was appointed to the living which his father had held at Mer, and was afterwards promoted to the professorship of Hebrew and Divinity in the Academy of Séclan. In 1681 that seat of learning was suppressed; and Jurieu, who had made himself obnoxious to government by a satirical pamphlet against the established clergy, retired to Rotterdam, where he became pastor of the Walloon church. Persecution and exile soured his temper, and the remainder of his life was made up of quarrels and controversies with men of his own or At the very moment that he was attacking Beauval, Basnage, and Saurin, he was constituting himself umpire between Bossuet and Fénelon, both of whom he insulted with an audacity little short of insane. When his friends Bayle and Jacquelot interfered to moderate a little the fury of his wrath, he libelled and ridiculed them as if they had been his bitter foes. The Catholic controversialists of the day used to call him in irony the Goliath of Protestantism. Though he is now chiefly remembered for his quarrels, Jurieu was a man of real learning and ability; but all his good qualities were stifled by the bad temper, fanaticism, and occasional insanity that marked alike his writings and his conduct. His works, with the exception of his Treatise on Devotion, are all controversial, and have long since passed into oblivion. Jurieu died at Rotterdam in 1713, in the seventy-sixth year of his age.