Baltimore had this idea and perhaps a still wider one: a land -- Mary's
land -- where all Christians might foregather, brothers and sisters in one
home! Religious tolerance -- practical separation of Church and State -- that
was a broad idea for his age, a generous idea for a Roman Catholic of a
time not so far removed from the mediaeval. True, wherever he went and
whatever might be his own thought and feeling, he would still have for
overlord a Protestant sovereign, and the words of his charter forbade him
to make laws repugnant to the laws of England. But Maryland was distant,
and wise management might do much. Catholics, Anglicans, Puritans,
Dissidents, and Nonconformists of almost any physiognomy, might come and be
at home, unpunished for variations in belief.
Only the personal friendship of England's King and the tact and suave
sagacity of the Proprietary himself could have procured the signing of this
charter, since it was known -- as it was to all who cared to busy themselves
with the matter -- that here was a Catholic meaning to take other Catholics,
together with other scarcely less abominable sectaries, out of the reach of
Recusancy Acts and religious pains and penalties, to set them free in
England-in-America; and, raising there a state on the novel basis of free
religion, perhaps to convert the heathen to all manner of errors, and embark
on mischiefs far too large for definition. Taking things as they were in
the world, remembering acts of the Catholic Church in the not distant past,
the ill-disposed might find some color for the agitation which presently did
arise.
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