Rutherford was born near Jedburgh in 1600, and educated at Edinburgh University, where he became Professor of Humanity in 1623. In 1625 he left the University, and from 1627 to 1639 (with a temporary ejection for non-conformity), he was minister of Anwoth in Galloway. In 1639 he was appointed Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews. From 1642 to 1647 he was in London as a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. On his return he became Principal of the New College in St. Andrews, and subsequently Rector of the University. He died in 1661. His principal works were “Exercitationes Apologeticæ” (Amsterdam, 1636), “Plea for Paul’s Presbytery in Scotland” (1646), “The Due Right of Presbyteries,” and “Lex, Rex” (1644), “The Trial and Triumph of Faith” (sermons, 1645), “Divine Right of Church Government and Excommunication” (1646), “Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself” (sermons, 1647), “A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist” (1648), “A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience” (1649), “The Covenant of Life Opened” (1655), “Influences of the Life of Grace” (1659), and “An Examination of Arminianism,” and the “Letters” (dating from 1639 to 1661), both of which were published posthumously. Several editions of the “Letters” have been issued in the present century, and at least one of “Lex, Rex.”

Personal

  Rutherford does not indeed stand on a level with the Church leaders of an earlier date. He cannot be compared with Melville or with Knox. He was not the greatest man in the country or the Church even of his own day: but he has always, even in quarters where we should least expect it, been regarded by some with a veneration and an affection which the greater men have ceased to evoke. To his admirers he was, in varying figures, “the renowned eagle,” “one of the most resplendent lights that ever arose in this horizon,” “that Flower of the Church, famous Mr. Samuel Rutherford,” “a most profound, learned man, a most plain and painful minister, and a most heavenly Christian.” When he had gone to his last resting-place, men desired that, after their death, they might be laid beside him. Even at the beginning of the present century, there was a nobleman who always reverently lifted his hat when he passed the supposed birthplace of Rutherford. Even within the last sixty years, masons have chosen rather to be dismissed from their employment than pull down the house in which he had lived. Even within the last twenty years, enthusiasts have lain all night upon that grave in the churchyard of the Cathedral of St. Andrews, in the hope of catching inspiration from him whose remains were buried there two centuries before. He is the only Covenanting divine whose writings can now lay any claim to popularity.

  He was a “little fair man,” and is said to have been “naturally of a hot and fiery temper.” He was certainly one of the most perfervid of Scotsmen, but seems to have had little of that humour which was seldom wanting in the grimmest of his contemporaries. “In the pulpit he had” (says a friend) “a strange utterance, a kind of skreigh that I never heard the like. Many a time I thought he would have flown out of the pulpit when he came to speak of Jesus Christ.” His abilities were of a high order, but as a church leader by his narrowness he helped to degrade and destroy presbyterianism which he loved so well, and in controversy he was too often bitter and scurrilous. With all his faults, his honesty, his steadfast zeal, and his freedom from personal ambition give him some claim to the title that has been given him of the “saint of the covenant.”

General

  The excellent Rutherford…. A very powerful, awakening, and heart-stirring writer.

  In Rutherford, indeed, both the poetry and the logic must be admitted to be of very inferior quality. Yet the same contrast of mental character is presented. He is scarcely the same writer in his “Letters,” the only productions of his pen now known, and in his argumentative treatises. The “Letters” are marked by the extravagances of a fancy lawless in its exuberance. The treatises are dull, barren, operose, and unillumined in argument to a frightful degree. Nobody without an effort can read them.

  You have, speaking generally, such assumption of personal infallibility, such fierceness of contradiction, such unmeasured vituperation, such extreme narrowness of sectarian orthodoxy, and such suspicion of all who differed from him, as is alike wonderful and sorrowful.

  Few men have so remarkably combined the qualities of a keen and able controversialist and a fervid and loving saint. No doubt tyranny and persecution had tinged him with bigotry and intolerance in matters which, in a happier age of liberty, we deem non-essential. But the chord of Christian love was ever the dominant one in his heart.

  We have not to do with him here as a man or as an author, but as a preacher, yet it is scarcely possible for us to ignore the two former in the third; and when we include them we are at once startled and perplexed, for I frankly confess that no character even in that stormy time seems to me so difficult to regard as a unit as that of Rutherford. There were two men in him, and the two were so distinct that you could hardly call him a “strange mixture,” for they did not mix. The one of them seemed to have no effect in conditioning or qualifying the other, but each was just as unshaded by the other as if it had stood alone.

  Rutherford is a writer most of whose books have a memorial only in the graveyard of history…. We pass from the brawls of the market-place to the cloistered, star-lit seclusion of those “Letters,” which the evangelical succession, from Baxter to Spurgeon, has united to declare seraphic and divine. Like Knox, Rutherford was a great father-confessor or director of souls. Knox, however, was no mystic. Rutherford had a quasi-oriental faculty of self-absorption in his ideal of “heavenly love.” This quality received partial expression in his sermons, but it is in his letters, where he was under no restraint, that its full development appears. The letters are the unstringing of a bent bow, the channel by which he delivered his soul. They are full of sympathy, rather of an angel writing from the seventh heaven than of a fellow-man…. The exceptional metaphors that give an air of alternate extravagance and quaintness to nearly every page of the “Letters” are borrowed, somewhat incongruously, from the imagery of the Song of Solomon, and from the devious practice of old Scots Law…. The “Letters,” as a Puritan classic, deserve a place beside “The Saint’s Rest” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

  Samuel Rutherford, the Presbyterian Thomas Aquinas, with his learning, his theological acumen, his piety—at once a great Church leader and a saint, equally at home among the tomes of the fathers, writing a letter of comfort to a poor widow, or praying in the hovels of his parishioners.