How were the Puritans motivated to "do something" as they believed in predestination and the "covenant of grace"?According to my sources, the...

This was actually one of the troublesome aspects of the Puritan faith that ultimately led to its decline. At first, in the new world, the Puritan colonists clung together because they were making their way in a new, undeveloped, hostile environment. They clung to each other and to the church. They followed God's law because they were conditioned to do so. Also, ministers were people who had felt God's call, and they were given free reign to interpret God's word. How they interpreted it could motivate the people to follow them. Also, God was painted for them as working in their everyday lives, the afterlife non withstanding. In his "Of Plymouth Plantation" William Bradford tells of the trip over on the Mayflower. He relates the tale of a young sailor who was overconfident and who began to mock the other passengers when they began to get sick at sea. He always bragged about his own health and talked of tossing the bodies of the sick overboard and stealing their possessions. As it turned out, however, this young man was the first to sicken and actually die; thus his was the first body tossed to the sea. This was seen as proof that God was just and that he enacted punishment against the wicked. So, even if your final destination was predetermined, God could also work for or against you in this life based on how you behaved.  However, as time went on and they started to do well for themselves and become prosperous they started to question a religion that believed that only an elect and predetermined few were saved. They started to move away from the small space occupied by the original colonies and explore the vast and seemingly endless frontier that went on for eternity to the west. They started to rely more on themselves and less on God. When they no longer needed the security of church and community to survive, and even more so when they came under the influence of more recent immigrants who did not follow the Puritan laws, they began to drift away from the church. This is one of the reasons why the Salem witch trials occurred. By banding the people together against a common enemy, witchcraft, the churches were able to bring people back into the congregation for safety and security.