a famous missionary of the ninth century, was a native of Thessalonica, and was originally a monk in the convent of St Basilus. Cyril at Constantinople. About 861 he was summoned to Nicopolis by a Christian princess, who was endeavouring to convert her brother Bogoris, King of Bulgaria. That monarch learning that Methodius was an adept in painting, commissioned him to represent the "Pleasures of the Chase." The artist, however, painted the "Last Judgment," with such terrible effect that Bogoris was roused from his indifference, and began to ponder seriously the admonitions he had formerly received from his pious sister. A severe famine that ensued deepened his impressions, and in 863 or 864 he was publicly baptized. Within a short time the majority of his subjects had followed his example. About this period Methodius and his brother Cyril went as missionaries to the Slavonic nation of the Moravians. They began their labours in this new field by constructing a Slavonic alphabet, and by translating the Scriptures into the Slavonic tongue. The truth, thus presented in a form that could be received into the minds and hearts of the people, was rapidly disseminated, and in no long time Methodius was consecrated archbishop of the Moravians by Pope Hadrian I. The zeal of Methodius, however, was too intense to be confined within any prescribed limits, and soon began to be exerted in the neighbouring German provinces, which were within the see of the Archbishop of Salzburg. The German clergy, indignant that a Greek ecclesiastic should encroach upon their jurisdiction, laid their complaint before Pope John VIII., along with a charge against Methodius for using the Slavonic language in divine worship. The offender was accordingly summoned to Rome in 879; but he pleaded his cause so ably, that the supreme pontiff was convinced of the utility and orthodoxy of his practice, and sent him home to his diocese in 880, with a commendatory letter to Svatopluk, King of Moravia. These favours only intensified the animosity of the German priesthood, and in the following year Methodius again carried his case to the pope. At this date he disappears altogether from history. In after times he was ranked among the saints.

MENNIODUS the Confessor, Patriarch of Constantinople, was born at Syracuse towards the end of the eighth century, and entered into orders at Constantinople. The patriarch of that city sent him on an embassy to Rome in 820. On his return he was intrusted by Pope Pashalis with a letter upbraiding the Emperor Michael for his harsh persecution of the image-worshippers. Stung by this rebuke, the emperor seized upon the unfortunate messenger, condemned him to suffer 700 lashes, and threw him into a noisome dungeon in one of the islands of the Propontis. There he would have been starved to death had not a poor fisherman contrived to relieve his daily wants. On the accession of Theophilus to the imperial throne, Methodius was released, and raised to high honours in the state. But his irrepressible zeal for image-worship subjected him to a second scourging and a second incarceration in his former dungeon. No sooner had he escaped from this Methone's private character was assailed by the foulest and the most perilous calumnies. Outliving, however, all these attacks, he was chosen patriarch of Constantinople in 842 by the Empress Theodora, the great patroness of image-worship. The rest of his life was occupied in zealously transferring all the power of the iconoclasts to the image-worshippers. He died in 846. Methodius the Confessor is the author of five orations in praise of monkery, and a collection of Canones Penitentiales.