SAMUEL, a divine celebrated for his piety and learning, was born about 1600 at the village of Nisbet in Roxburghshire, and was educated for the church at the university of Edinburgh. Being appointed in 1627 to the parish of Anwoth in Kirkcudbrightshire, he addressed himself to his work with a holy zeal. He rose in the morning at three o'clock to meditate and pray. The care of his poor, ignorant flock occupied his every thought. Many of them by name were made the subject of his frequent wrestlings with God. Even his very dreams were disturbed with anxiety on their account. Nor after he had been deposed and banished from his office in 1636, for preaching against the Articles of Perth, did he forget his charge. No sooner was Episcopacy overthrown in 1638 than he hastened home from Aberdeen to Anwoth. After his settlement in 1639 as professor of divinity at St Mary's College, St Andrews, Rutherford began to take a prominent part in the politics of the church. He was sent up to London in 1643 as one of the commissioners from Scotland to the Westminster Assembly. Remaining there at his post for four years, he did great service to the cause of his party. He exerted himself to get his peculiar views embodied in the Shorter Catechism which was then drawn up. So great also were his efforts in favour of Presbyterianism that Milton attacked him by name in the poem entitled On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament. At the same time, his pen was busily employed in the same cause. He published The Due Right of Presbytery, 1644; Lex Rex, 1644; The Trial and Triumph of Faith, 1645; and The Divine Right of Church Government, 1646. The last days of Samuel Rutherford were assailed by the persecution which followed the Restoration in 1660. His Lex Rex was burnt in front of his own windows. All his offices were taken from him. He himself would also have been arraigned before the Parliament had he not been summoned away before a superior judiciary on the 20th March 1661. (See The Letters of the Rev. Samuel Rutherford, accompanied with a Sketch of his Life, by the Rev. A. A. Bonar, Edinburgh, 1848.)