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 Conferences were rejected. The controversy centred upon lay representation, the episcopacy and the presiding eldership.

A General Convention was held on the 2nd of November 1830, a Constitution was adopted, and a new organization was established, styled the Methodist Protestant Church. Within eight years it had accumulated 50,000 members, the majority of whom were in the South and bordering states. The Methodist Protestant Church has a presbyterial form of government, the powers being in the Conference. There is no episcopal office or General Superintendent; each Annual Conference elects its own chairman. Its General Conference meets once in four years. Ministers and laymen equal in number are elected by the Annual Conferences, in a ratio of one delegate for 1000 members. The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church of 1908 sent delegates to the Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church, making overtures toward an organic union, but formal negotiations have not been instituted. This Church had, in 1907, 1551 ministers, 2242 churches and 183,894 communicants.

The Wesleyan Methodist Connection or Church of America.—In the Methodist Episcopal Church slavery was always a cause of contention. In 1842 certain Methodist abolitionists conferred as to the wisdom of seceding. Among the leaders were Orange Scott (1800–1847), Jotham Horton and Le Roy Sunderland (1802–1885) and in a paper, which they had established, known as The True Wesleyan, they announced their withdrawal from the Church, and issued a call for a convention of all like-minded, which met on the 31st of May 1843, at Utica, New York, and founded the Wesleyan Methodist Connection or Church of America. The enterprise started with 6000 laymen and 22 travelling ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and nearly as many more from the Methodist Protestant Church and other small bodies of Methodist antecedents. Its General Conference has an equal number of ministers and laymen. In less than eighteen months this body had gained in members 250%; but as the Methodist Episcopal Church had purged itself from slavery in 1844, and slavery itself was abolished in 1862, a large number of ministers and thousands of communicants, connected with this body, returned to the Methodist Episcopal Church. It had in 1907 539 ministers, 609 churches and 18,587 communicants.

METHODIST NEW CONNEXION, a Protestant Nonconformist Church, formed in 1797 by secession from the Wesleyan Methodists, and merged in 1907 into the (q.v.). The secession was led by (q.v.), and resulted from a dispute regarding the position and rights of the laity, Kilham and his party desiring more power for the members of the Church and less for the ministers. In its conferences ministers and laymen were of equal number, the laymen being chosen by the circuits and in some cases by “guardian representatives” elected for life by conference. Otherwise the doctrines and order of the Connexion were the same as those of the Wesleyans. At the time of the union with the Bible Christians and the United Methodist Free Church in 1907 the Methodist New Connexion had some 250 ministers and 45,000 members.

METHODIUS (c. 825–885), the apostle of the Slavs, was a native of Thessalonica, probably by nationality a Graecized Slav. His father’s name was Leo, and his family was socially distinguished; Methodius himself had already attained high official rank in the government of Macedonia before he determined to become a monk. His younger brother Constantine (better known as Cyril, the name he adopted at Rome shortly before his death) was a friend of Photius, and had earned the surname “the Philosopher” in Constantinople before he withdrew to monastic life. Constantine about 860 had been sent by the emperor Michael III. to the Khazars, a Tatar people living north-east of the Black Sea, in response to their request for a Christian teacher, but had not remained long among them; after his return to within the limits of the empire, his brother and he worked among the Bulgarians of Thrace and Moesia, baptizing their king Bogoris in 861. About 863, at the invitation of Rastislav, king of “Great Moravia,” who desired the Christianization of his subjects, but