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More like Americans of later generations than their contemporary Puritans in England, the American Puritans were more interested in institutions that functioned than in elegant theories. They were more interested in purifying practices than in perfecting theology, and more committed to platforms than to creeds. This emphasis on practice, on a way of life, was so strong that it made any generalized concept of the church seem unreal or even dangerous. They offered neither a creed nor a church but the New England Way.
That way, increasingly, was defined in terms of outward, social responsibilities. Sainthood was defined in terms of the inward work of grace in the heart and the outward owning of the covenant. But only owning the covenant was an empirical phenomenon visible to all and indisputable. More and more the social dimension was given priority in human relationships. By the end of the first generation, the Half-Way Covenant was adopted whereby critical rights were extended to those citizens lacking an experience of grace but willing to own the covenant.
The basic fact about New England congregationalism, again to quote Boorstin, was its emphasis on the going relationship among men. Each church was not a part of a hierarchy, nor a branch of a perfected institution, but a kind of club composed of individual Christians searching for a godly way of life. At the heart of their ideas
was the unifying notion that a proper Christian church was one adapted to the special circumstances of its place and arising out of the continuing agreement of particular Christians. A church was formed by the covenanting or agreement of a group of saints, that is, Christians who had had a special converting experience. They replaced the traditional European sacramental system with a more modern and functional one. A minister was called by a congregation; when the relation ceased, he was no longer a minister. Marriage was a contract between two consenting parties. Thus relationships among men overshadowed inherited or anointed status. As Jonathan Clark insists in his recent study, The Language of Liberty 1660-1832, the theory which grounded the legitimacy of government on the consent of the governed [for Americans in the Revolutionary era] did not arise primarily as a comment on the practice of representation in the colonies: it drew its main force from the idea of covenant in colonial religion.
Being colonials encouraged the Puritans in their conservative thought patterns. However utopian their thought, they did not consider themselves free to construct their political institutions apart from English precedents and control. They assumed that there were definite limits which the legislators were not free to transgress; i.e., constitutionalism. Furthermore, they assumed that the primary and normal way of developing civil institutions was by custom and traditon rather than by legislative or administrative fiat. The charter of 1629 provided they could make all manner of wholesome and reasonable laws, but with the provision that they be not contrairie to the Lawes of this our Realme of England. In 1635, the deputies, worried about lack of restraints on the magistrates, convinced the General Court that some men should be appointed to frame a body of grounds of laws, in resemblance to a Magna Charta, which . . . should be received for fundamental laws. Though, in codifying their laws, the Puritans said that they started from the lawes of God, rather than the laws of Englishmen, in their minds the two frequently coincided. This conservative cast saved Puritans from many of the extremes that so frequently accompany utopian thought. There is a strikingly pragmatic quality to their work, a quality nurtured by the English law as well as by their own vivid sense of evil. Again and again one sees in Puritanism a focus on human and practical problems.
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