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Matthew Simpson Hughes, pastor of the Independence
Avenue Methodist Church, was born at Doddridge, Virginia, February 2,
1863. He was educated at Linsley Institute and at the West
Virginia University, in whose faculty at that time was Wm. L. Wilson,
afterwards famous as the author of the Wilson Bill in Congress.
Dr. Hughes lived in Virginia until he was twenty-four years old.
He was ordained for the ministry in 1888 and his first pastoral work
was in Iowa. He rose rapidly, and was soon called to the
Methodist Church in Portland, the largest Protestant Church in the
State of Maine. He next went to the Wesley Church in Minneapolis
from which he was called to the Kansas City church in 1898.
Dr. Hughes studied law, and was offered a
partnership with one of the leading attorneys of Pennsylvania.
He was city editor of a newspaper at Morganstown and one at
Parkersburg.
Newspaper work gave him facility and a deep
knowledge of human nature, while the law imparted a certain judicial
dispassionate tinge to his mind. He is a brilliant pulpit
orator, whose oratory, however, is of ideas, not mere words.
Dr. Hughes was married to Miss Harriet F.
Wheeler at Grinnell, Ia., in 1888. They have two children,
Blakely and Esther.
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