Mathew, Theobald, or Father Mathew, apostle of temperance, born in Tipperary; studied for the Catholic priesthood, but joined the Capuchin Minorites; was in 1814 ordained a priest, and located in Cork, where at sight of the cruel effects of drunkenness on the mass of the people his heart was moved, and he resolved on a crusade against it to stamp it out; he started on this enterprise in 1827, but it took a year and a half before his mission bore any fruit, and then it was accompanied with marvellous success wherever he went, even as far as the New World itself (1790‒1856).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Mather, Cotton * Mathews, Charles