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The Catholic Democracy of America, 43
harbors of the Chesapeake, and there, too, Protestants were
sheltered against Protestant intolerance."
The authors of "The Catholic Church in the United States "
refuse to give to the Calverts and their followers any credit
for their principles of toleration:—
" To gain entrance to Lord Baltimore's vast domains was necessary to
believe in the divinity of Christ; but if, even with this restriction, the conduct
of the founders of Maryland is the object of so much eulogy in America,
we must claim our right to hesitate in joining in it. . . . When a
State has the happiness of possessing unity of religion, and that religion
the truth, we cannot conceive how the government can facilitate the division
of creeds. Lord Baltimore had seen too well how the English Catholics
were crushed by the Protestants as soon as they were the strongest
and most numerous; he should have foreseen that it would be so in Maryland,
so that the English Catholics, instead of finding liberty in America,
only changed their bondage. Instead, then, of admiring the liberality of
Lord Baltimore,, we prefer to believe that he obtained his charter from
Charles I. only on the formal condition of admitting Protestants on an
equal footing with Catholics."
It is difficult to conceive that these words were written in the
United States of America, by American citizens, in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. It is fortunate for Catholicism
that the sagacious chiefs of the American hierarchy
have not shared this regret that the Roman Catholic Church
was not established in perpetuity as a local sect, instead of
having become, by their wise policy, working freely in a free
country, the most powerful religious community in the most
prosperous nation of the world. Supposing that the founders
of the Republic had favored this idea of local sectarianism
and that America had become a nation notwithstanding,
would these historians, for the sake of preserving Catholic
uniformity in Maryland, submit to arrest on crossing the
Potomac at Harper's Ferry because the State of Virginia
required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles? Would
they like to read in the Philadelphia "Ledger" how a Quaker
and his wife from Pennsylvania had been hanged by the
Independents on Boston Common as the penalty of a little
tour in Massachusetts, which Puritan State, under the policy