Congruences on a Distributive Lattice

Among the many papers on the subject of lattices I have not seen any simple discussion of the congruences on a distributive lattice. It is the purpose of this note to give such a discussion for lattices with a certain finiteness. Any distributive lattice is isomorphic with a ring of sets (G. Birkhoff, Lattice Theory, revised edition, 1948, p. 140, corollary to Theorem 6); I take the case where the sets are finite. All finite distributive lattices are covered by this case.