Robert Bruce (1554 – 27 July 1631) was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland which was called on 6 February 1588 to prepare defences against a possible invasion by the Spanish Armada.

King James VI was so sensible of the valuable services of the church in preserving public tranquillity, during his absence in Norway (part of Denmark at the time) on the occasion of his marriage, that in his letters to Bruce he declared that he was "worth the quarter of his kingdom.

"[1] John Livingstone, the preacher at the Kirk of Shotts revival, said of Bruce "in my opinion never man spake with greater power since the apostles' dayes".

In September 1596, with the Edinburgh merchant Clement Cor and the physician Gilbert Moncreiff he interviewed a woman from Nokwalter in Perth, Christian Stewart, who was accused of causing the death of Patrick Ruthven by witchcraft.

He was allowed to return after a time, and, in May 1598, was appointed Minister to the Little Kirk, a division of St Giles, though he quibbled a bit about the admission ceremony.

He even acted as Minister at Forres’ In 1609, his son managed to persuade the King to let Bruce return to his own lands at Kinnaird, near Stirling.

It is told, as an instance of the effect of his sermons, that a poor Highlander one day came to him after he had concluded, and offered to him his whole wealth (two cows), on condition that he would make God his friend.

Accustomed to continual prayer and intense meditation on religious subjects, his ardent imagination at times appears to have lost itself in visions of the divine favour; a specious, but natural illusion, by which the most virtuous minds have been deceived and supported, when reason and philosophy have been summoned in vain.

His skill in the languages, and the sciences of those times, not to mention his acquaintance with the laws and constitution of the kingdom, a branch of knowledge possessed by few of his brethren, was equal, if not superior, to that of any of the Scottish reformers.

His sermons, of which sixteen were printed in his lifetime, display a boldness of expression, regularity of style, and force of argument, seldom to be found in the Scottish writers of the sixteenth century.