Note 25 — LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY

In refreshing contrast with this record of persecution is the proclamation of religious liberty in Maryland, 1650. “The Catholics took quiet possession [of Maryland], and religious liberty obtained a home, its only home in the wide world ... every other country had persecuting laws.... Protestants were sheltered against Protestant intolerance. The disfranchized friends of Prelacy in Massachusetts and the Puritans from Virginia were welcomed to equal liberty of conscience and political rights as Roman Catholics in the province of Maryland.... In 1649 the General Assembly of Maryland passed an Act to this effect, yet five years later, when the Puritans obtained the ascendency there, they rewarded their benefactors by passing an Act forbidding that liberty of conscience be extended to ‘popery,’ ‘prelacy,’ and ‘licentiousness of opinion’” (Bancroft’s History of the United States, I, VII.).

Lecky corroborates this statement: “Hôpital and Lord Baltimore were the two first legislators who uniformly maintained liberty of conscience, and Maryland continues the one solitary home for the oppressed of every sect till Puritans succeeded in subverting Catholic rule, when they basely enacted the whole penal code against those who had so nobly and so generously received them” (History of Rationalism, II, 58).

An abridged copy of the Act of 1650, the first Act of religious toleration, will be found in the Appendix. The original from which I copied is in the archives of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.