FORBES, JO/IN, • divine and polemical writer, second son of Patrick Forbes, bishop of Aberdeen, was born on the 2nd of May 151'3. He studied at Heidelberg and Sedan, and returned to Scotland in 1619. In that year he was appointed professor of divinity in King's College, Aberdeen, an office in which he acquired a high character for learning and ability. Ho lived during the period of the hottest struggles for supremacy between episcopacy and Presbyterianism; and possessed with the views of toleration and ecclesiastical peace that appear to have distinguished his family, ho published iu 1629, at Aberdeen, ' Irenicum Amatoribus Veritatis et Pacis in Eccloaia Scotia a.' Afterward., in 1638, when the breach between the two par ties, Which was the commencement of the civil wars, had begun, he published 'A peaceable Warning to the subjects in Scotland.' Ho M an afterwards a leader in a polemical dispute as one of those generally styled "the Aberdeen doctor," who conducted, on the side of Episcopacy, a controversy with the Covenanters. Like his cowl
jutora, Forbes was deprived of his benefice in 1640. His case was one of peculiar hardship, for he had Wilde over part of his own private property to be attached to the professorship which he held ; and he lost thisproperty on being dismissed from his office. In 7614 he went to Holland, where he married a Dutch woman named Sect° Roosboom, or Sweet Roactree. He returned to Aberdeen in 1646, and died on the 29th of April 1648. Besides the works already men tioned, he published others on kindred subjects, Some of which peered through more than one separate edition ; and the whole, along with some posthumous additions, were collectively published in his ' Opera Omnia,' st Amsterdam, 2 vols. folio, 1702-8.