Samuel Rutherford was born around 1600 in Nisbet, in the Scottish Borders, and was educated at the University of Edinburgh before taking up the parish ministry at Anwoth in Galloway in 1627. He served that rural congregation for nearly a decade with extraordinary pastoral intensity, preaching frequently and visiting his people with a dedication that became almost legendary among those who remembered him. His first years of ministry were also shadowed by personal grief — the prolonged illness and death of his first wife among them — and this early acquaintance with suffering gave a distinctive weight to the comfort he would later offer others.
Rutherford lived through one of the most turbulent periods in Scottish ecclesiastical history. His Calvinist convictions and opposition to the episcopal policies of Charles I brought him into conflict with the crown, and in 1636 he was banished from his parish and confined to Aberdeen, forbidden to preach. It was during this enforced exile that he wrote the remarkable series of letters that would secure his lasting reputation. Composed for parishioners, friends, and fellow ministers, the letters were not written for publication but circulated privately before appearing in print after his death.
The Letters — eventually numbering over three hundred — are remarkable for the warmth and precision of their spiritual language. Rutherford wrote of Christ with an ardor that strikes some readers as extravagant and others as simply honest, and he had a gift for meeting correspondents in their particular griefs, doubts, and temptations without reducing those experiences to formula. He returned to Anwoth after the National Covenant of 1638, later taught theology at St Andrews, and played a significant role at the Westminster Assembly in London. In his final years he faced renewed political danger at the Restoration, dying in 1661 before he could be tried for treason.
His Letters have remained in print for centuries, valued by readers across denominational lines as one of the most searching and tender works of pastoral correspondence in the English language.