1576. The town is of high antiquarian interest. There is a Protestant

cathedral church, the diocese of which was united with Dublin in 1846. St Brigit or Bridget founded the religious community in the 5th century, and a fire sacred to the memory of the saint is said to have been kept incessantly burning for several centuries (until the Reformation) in a small ancient chapel called the Fire House, part of which remains. The cathedral suffered with the town from frequent burnings and destructions at the hands of the Danes and the Irish, and during the Elizabethan wars. The existing church was partially in ruins when an extensive restoration was begun in 1875 under the direction of G.E. Street; while the choir, which dated from the latter part of the 17th century, was rebuilt in 1896. Close to the church are an ancient cross and a very fine round tower (its summit unhappily restored with a modern battlement) 105½ ft. high, with a doorway with unusual ornament of Romanesque character. There are remains of a castle of the 13th century, and of a Carmelite monastery. From the elevated situation of the town, a striking view of the great central plain of Ireland is afforded. Kildare was incorporated by James II., and returned two members to the Irish parliament. KILHAM, ALEXANDER (1762-1798), English Methodist, was born at Epworth, Lincolnshire, on the 10th of July 1762. He was admitted by John Wesley in 1785 into the regular itinerant ministry. He became the leader and spokesman of the democratic party in the Connexion which claimed for the laity the free election of class-leaders and stewards, and equal representation with ministers at Conference. They also contended that the ministry should possess no official authority or pastoral prerogative, but should merely carry into effect the decisions of majorities in the different meetings. Kilham further advocated the complete separation of the Methodists from the Anglican Church. In the violent controversy that ensued he wrote many pamphlets, often anonymous, and frequently not in the best of taste. For this he was arraigned before the Conference of 1796 and expelled, and he then founded the Methodist New Connexion (1798, merged since 1906 in the United Methodist Church). He died in 1798, and the success of the church he founded is a tribute to his personality and to the principles for which he strove. Kilham's wife (Hannah Spurr, 1774-1832), whom he married only a few months before his death, became a Quaker, and worked as a missionary in the Gambia and at Sierra Leone; she reduced to writing several West African vernaculars. KILIA, a town of S. Russia, in the government of Bessarabia, 100 m. S.W. of Odessa, on the Kilia branch of the Danube, 20 m. from its mouth. Pop. (1897), 11,703. It has steam flour-mills and a rapidly increasing trade. The town, anciently known as Chilia, Chele, and Lycostomium, was a place of banishment for political dignitaries of Byzantium in the 12th-13th centuries. After belonging to the Genoese from 1381-1403 it was occupied successively by Walachia and Moldavia, until in 1484 it fell into the hands of the Ottoman Turks. It was taken from them by the Russians in