American clergyman, bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, born in Tuscaloosa, AL, on the 23rd of February 1832. His education was received at academies in Lewisburg and Milton, PA, and at the Wesleyan Institute. His pastoral duties were performed in Illinois and New Jersey. He established the Sunday School Quarterly in Chicago in 1865, and the Sunday School Teacher, containing the first issues of his modern lesson system, which has become international, in 1866. He was also the author of a large number of Sunday-school publications, but is best known as the chief organizer of the Chautauqua series of educational institutions and the Chautauqua Assembly, which he established in 1874. He became corresponding secretary of the general Sunday School Union and Tract Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and editor of the Sunday-school and tract periodicals of that church, in 1868. He was elected bishop at the General Conference of 1888, his episcopal residence being at Topeka, KS. He has written Chautauqua Text-Books in history and many other works, including Studies in Young Life (1890); My Mother (1892); The Story of a Letter (1893); and Earthly Footsteps of the Man of Galilee (1894).
