Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/377

 NEW ENGLAND REVIVALS 363

to date, for five churches of importance in northeastern Massa- chusetts. In 1 71 7 revivals added 395 to these churches and 281 were added the next year, or an average of 338. For ten years before the average annual additions were 62. For the eleven years following they were 28 on the average. Then a lesser re- vival increased the additions in 1741 and 1742, to be followed by a decline as before. Jonathan Edwards writes of the great re- vival in the First Church of Newburyport in 1742. The records show that 118 came into that church in that year, that iii were added in the preceding five years. and 16 in all in the six years following the revival. There are no official records of the additions in Northampton in the great revivals of 1734 and 1742. But Edwards writes that there were 300 conversions and that 100 united with the church before one communion and 60 before another. Yet in later years he laments that not one had come into the church in the years 1744-48. Perhaps part of this decline may have been due to his troubles over social matters, for his theological difficulties did not begin until 1749.

But the nineteenth century was the great century for revivals. They began in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The vigorous growth of the new order of Methodists and the push- ing-out of the Baptists in those years undoubtedly greatly stimu- lated revivals. Probably the doctrinal advance among the Congregational ists contributed to interest in revivals as well as in foreign missions. The Methodist Conference of those days, covering much of eastern Massachusetts and vicinity, increased its membership from 4,260 in 1799 to 8,540 in 1805. Baptist churches increased about as rapidly as the Methodists. Rev. A. W. Smith, of the Backus Library, Boston, in an unpublished paper, gives some statistics of baptisms in the churches of Boston and vicinity in the early years of the nineteenth cen- tury, which go to show that frequent revivals in those years put the Baptists of New England on their feet and left them in 181 7 with about 500 churches in New England and 37,690 members. But exact data applicable to the object of this paper are want- ing. The work of both the Baptists and the Methodists in those days was largely missionary, in some sense a propaganda on