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The Puritans third major problem was what made for a feasible federal organization. How should power be distributed between local and central organs? Congregationalism, the Puritan church, itself was an attempt to answer this question with specific institutions, to find a means by which churches could extend the free hand of fellowship to one another without binding individual churches or individual church-members to particular dogmas or holding them in advance to the decisions of a central body. Thus a synod, a gathering of representatives of all of the churches, was empowered to examine scripture and determine a correct position. However, this synod was denied juridical authority. Any charges brought against an individual for violation of the doctrinal or disciplinary standards of the church had to be presented in the individuals local congregation and resolved there in a kind of ecclesiastical trial before a jury of ones peers. The practical issues which did not fall
under either of the two earlier questions came within this class. What power, if any, had the General Court of the colony over the towns in their selection of their militia officers? One of the townsmen of Hingham expressed willingness to die for the right to choose the officers of the town militia. Or, what was the power of the central government to call a church synod? The deputies of the towns were willing to consider an invitation to send delegates, but objected to a command.
If we examine the actual offices and functions of government is Massachusetts Bay in its first generation, we look in vain for the complex system of checks and balances that characterizes American constitutionalism or for the fully elaborated definition of authority vested in federal and state governments. Yet the major themes with which the Constitutional Convention wrestled in 1787 and which have enlivened American political debate ever since seem to be there in embryo:
How to choose good leaders and avoid choosing bad leaders; how to vest sufficient power in government to permit its functioning without granting a license for tyranny; how to balance the interests of the whole people with the interests of smaller units, and, finally, how to move from principle to application, from grand design to a functioning, viable society.
However, early American Puritanism was elitist and hierarchical. How these basic Puritan ideas came to be worked into a revolutionary framework can only be explained by reference to the English civil wars of the seventeenth century and to the defense of revolution against the monarch advanced by John Locke.
The first civil wars, those of the 1630s and 1640s, sometimes termed the Puritan Rebellion, pitted the Parliament against the King in a struggle over an appropriate definition of sovereignty. The leadership of the Parliamentary and anti- royal party was Puritan. While the Parliamentary armies defeated the royal armies and the king was subsequently executed, the Protectorate that followed proved to be a failure. Therefore in 1660 the English monarchy was restored. However, since Parliament invited Charles II to return and become king, it assumed he would honor the rights of Parliament. He and particularly hiss brother, James II, who succeeded him on the throne, failed to do so. Parliamentary frustration with the restored monarchy led in 1688 to a second revolution, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89.
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