Matthias, was born at Tarrytown. The beginning of his ordained ministry is unclear. His obituary indicated that he was ordained as a Deacon in 1797, but the Minutes indicate that he was not admitted “on trial” until 1811, and apparently ordained Deacon in 1812. In any case, he clearly was active in ministry, whether lay or ordained, from 1793 onward. (The Minutes kept no record of lay ministers or their appointments, even though they were a significant part of the development of the early Methodist Episcopal Church. Dixon noted that in 1848, almost half of the clergy in the New York Conference were lay ministers: 254 ministers and 220 local preachers.) The obituary indicates that he had hoped to be appointed as a full-time minister in 1810, but he was married with a family, and the church officials preferred young single men for the arduous work of circuit riding. Since there were enough such single ministers in the New York Conference, Matthias was passed over, much to his disappointment. Then, in the fall of 1810, he was asked to take responsibility for a circuit where the appointed minister had become ill. A layman from Rhinebeck, NY, gave him a horse, and he began his full-time ministry. For the next 30 years he served as minister on circuits up and down the Hudson River valley from just north of New York City to Schenectady. We don't have good records of the boundaries of the circuits, but their size is suggested by one bit of data: In 1814–1815, Matthias served two years on the Albany circuit (apparently not including the main congregation in Albany, but possibly including another, smaller congregation in the city), and one of the congregations on this circuit was Windham, more than south. In 1840 Matthias had such a serious problem with cataracts that he could not see well enough to guide his horse, so for his last year of active ministry, his wife had to accompany him on the circuit. At the 1841 meeting of the New York Annual Conference he received a superannuated relation (i.e., retired), and resided at his son's home on Hempstead, L. I. until his death on May 27, 1848. At his death, his son, John J. Matthias, was attending the infamous Methodist Episcopal General Conference of 1848, at which the decision was made to split the denomination over the issue of slavery, and