364 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
doctrinal lines contrary to the positions of the Congregation- alists. Their revivals v^^ere largely extensive, reaching out- wards, rather than an intensive development of their old fields, as was the case with the Congregationalists.
Among the Congregationalists of Connecticut and Massa- chusetts there were many revivals in the first thirty years of the last century. The religious revolution in Yale College and the birth of foreign missions fell within this period. Nettleton for twenty years from 181 2 and Finney, who began in the last year or two of that period, come to the front as leaders. But with slight exceptions, whose figures are incorporated in one of the following tables, nothing of especial value to the present study remains. But from 1831 revivals in the last century seem to sweep over wider fields at the same time, those of earlier years appearing now in one locality and now in another. This was the period of four days' "protracted meetings." Still those revivals are by no means coextensive with state lines or with the boundaries of New England. Sometimes the revivals of one year in a state are followed or preceded by revivals in other parts. Some of these are mentioned in the notes that accom- pany the tables. Others are obvious.
There were four great revivals in the period especially under investigation. These centered in the years 1831, 1842, or 1843 mostly, 1858, and 1877, though in localities reported or actu- ally coming the year after or sometimes the year before.
The first table that follows gives, so far as they can be found without going to the original church records, the additions of members who join for the first time, and not by letter from other churches, in the revival year and the number of those who come into the churches in the same way in the five years before the revival year and then in the six years after that year. But in case of the Methodists the annual gains and losses in members are used except in the revival of 1877 where the figures stand for probationers only. The table shows how revivals affect de- nominations as a whole, including both the churches that had the revivals and the rest. The sixth year following the revival is added that the turn of the tide may be noted, if it occurs then.
