satisfied to submit to government by an exclusive class, comprising in
Massachusetts one tenth of the people and in the New Haven colony one
ninth. These alone had any voice in making the laws. In submitting to
their dictation, the large majority of the people had to submit to a
"government that left no incident, circumstance, or experience of the
life of an individual, personal, domestic, social, or civil, still
less anything that concerned religion, free from the direct or
indirect interposition of public authority." [29] Such inquisitorial
supervision was due to the close alliance of Church and State within
the narrow limits of a theocracy. In more liberal Plymouth and
Connecticut, the "watch and ward" over one's fellows, which the early
colonial church insisted upon, was extended only over church members,
and even over them was less rigorous, less intrusive. Something of
the development of the great authority of the State over the churches
and of its attitude and theirs towards synods may be gleaned from the
earliest pages of Massachusetts ecclesiastical history. The
starting-point of precedent for the elders of the church to be
regarded as advisors only and the General Court as authoritative seems
to have been in a matter of taxation, when, in February, 1632, the
General Court assessed the church in Watertown. The elders advised
resistance; the Court compelled payment. In the following July, the
Boston church inquired of the churches of Plymouth, Salem, Dorchester,
and Watertown, whether a ruling elder could at the same time hold
office as a civil magistrate. A correspondence ensued and the answer
returned was that he could not. Thereupon, Mr. Nowell resigned his
eldership in the Boston church. [30] Winthrop mentions eight[d]
important occasions between 1632 and 1635 when the elders, which term
included pastors, teachers, and ruling elders, were summoned by the
General Court of Massachusetts to give advice upon temporal
affairs. In March of 1635-36 the Court "entreated them (the elders)