Samuel Augustus Willoughby Duffield was born at Brooklyn, on September 24th, 1843. His family was of French Huguenot extraction (Du Field), and found a home in the North of Ireland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Between 1725 and 1730 George Duffield, his ancestor by five removes, settled in Lancaster County, as one of the great Ulster emigration which was flowing into Pennsylvania. His son George graduated at Princeton, and after several pastorates was settled in Philadelphia in the Pine Street church. He was an ardent patriot, chaplain in Washington’s army, and Bishop White’s associate in the chaplaincy of the Continental Congress. Of two sons who survived him, one became a minister, while the other took a prominent part in public life. His grandson, Rev. George Duffield, D.D. (1796-1868) was a leader of the New School division of the Presbyterian Church, both before and after the separation of 1837, and while pastor at Carlisle was arraigned for unsound teaching in his work on _Regeneration_. “Barnes, Beman, and Duffield” were the three names most offensive to the Aristarchuses of orthodoxy in that time. He was married to a sister of Dr. George W. Bethune. His son, generally known in our times as Dr. George Duffield, Jr., to distinguish him from his father, was born in 1818 at Carlisle, graduated at Yale College in 1837, and at Union Theological Seminary. One of his pastorates was in Brooklyn, from 1840 to 1847, during which his son, Samuel Augustus Willoughby, was born. He is best known as a hymn-writer, two of his hymns being known and loved wherever the English language is spoken. They are, “Blessed Saviour, Thee I love,” and “Stand up, stand up for Jesus,” the latter being suggested by the dying words of Dudley Tyng in 1858. Samuel W. Duffield was of the sixth American generation of his family. From his youth he was a young giant, with an inborn love of active sports, quick in movement, and apparently incapable of fatigue. His mind showed equal vigor and freshness, and he early developed a passion for poetry. By his tenth year he had mastered Chaucer, in spite of difficulties much more serious to beginners in those days than in our own. And he very early began to find expression for his own ideas in verse. He united with the Church at the age of thirteen, when his father was a pastor in Philadelphia, being the only one who did so at the time, so that the act was the result of personal decision and not of a revival excitement. He graduated at Yale in 1863; and after teaching for a while, he began the study of theology under the care of his grandfather and his father. Not until after he had been licensed to preach, and had had charge of a mission in Chicago, did he present himself as a student in Union Theological Seminary.