leader of the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, which interpreted the Kingdom of God as requiring social as well as individual salvation.

Educated at Colby College, Waterville, Maine; Newton Theological Institution, Newton, Mass.; and the University of Berlin, Mathews taught at Colby from 1887 to 1894. Thereafter he taught in the divinity school of the University of Chicago, of which he was dean from 1908 until his retirement in 1933.

Mathews published more than a score of books and hundreds of articles, among them The Messianic Hope in the New Testament (1905), The Spiritual Interpretation of History (1916), The Faith of Modernism (1924), and Creative Christianity (1935). His autobiography, New Faith for Old (1936), is a significant document for the history of the Social Gospel movement in the United States.