Toleration. Toleration was the Baltimore policy from the beginning. It was no doubt in the original plan of George Calvert and his associates, whoever they were. [Note 15.] The Provincial of the Society of Jesus privately furnished Baltimore with arguments in defense of this policy before the first colony sailed. The founders of Maryland were men of affairs shaping plan to opportunity, and the situation was inexorable. Toleration and protection was all that English Roman Catholics could hope to find in traveling thus to the ends of the earth.
Toleration a policy. Cecilius gave positive instruction that on shipboard acts of the Roman Catholic religion should be performed with as much privacy as possible, so as not to offend the Protestant passengers "whereby any just complaint may hereafter be made by them in Virginia or in England." There is no pretense of theory here; all is based on the exigency of the situation and sound policy. The policy was George Calvert's, whose school was the court of James, and whose whole career shows that he entertained no advanced views of human liberty. Had he held toleration as a theory of government, his doctrine would have been more liberal than that of Ralegh and Bacon and far in advance of that of contemporary Puritan leaders. They quite misunderstand the man who regard him as a progressive thinker; he was a conservative opportunist. Still less was Cecilius a man likely to act on general principles.
XV.
Religious observance at sea. We have seen how religiously the Puritans passed their time at sea in long daily expositions of Scripture and other devotions, and that sometimes even the watch was set with a psalm. Not less religious were the Catholic pilgrims, and though the form is strikingly different, the believing and zealous age is the same. To make things safe, the Jesuit fathers committed the principal parts of the ship in some detail to the protection of God in the first place, and then to that "of His Most Holy Mother and of St. Ignatius and of all the angels of Maryland." Relatio Itineris, p. 10. These angels to whom the safety of Maryland was committed were kept busy by special spiritual opponents. A dangerous storm was raised on one occasion by all the "malignant spirits of the tempest and all the evil genii of Maryland." [Note 16.] But Father White circumvented this combination of ordinary storm spirits with imps of Protestant proclivities by setting forth to Christ and the Blessed Virgin, while the storm was at its worst, "that the purpose of this journey was to glorify the Blood of our Redeemer in the salvation of the Barbarians, and also to build up a kingdom for the Saviour and to consecrate another gift to the Immaculate Virgin his mother." Relatio Itineris, 16, 17. The last clause apparently refers to Maryland, as if it were named in honor of the Virgin. The representation was effective; the good father had scarcely ceased speaking when the storm began to abate.
The arrival. The Puritans when using a geographical name that began with the word "saint" scrupulously uncanonized it by leaving off the prefix. But these devout pilgrims of the Roman faith, when once the saints and guardian angels of Maryland had piloted them safe in spite of the malice of storm spirits and evil genii into landlocked waters and the bounds of Lord Baltimore's grant, proceeded to sanctify the whole region by sprinkling it with the names of saints and angels from Michael the archangel downward. The ancient Indian designations were marks of a heathenism they purposed to overthrow, and they began by trying to get rid of the whole "bead roll of unbaptized names." No convenient island, creek, river, bay, or cape escaped Christian baptism. On Annunciation Day, 1634, they landed on Heron Island, in the Potomac, which they named appropriately for St. Clement, who was martyred by being thrown into the sea attached to an anchor, and here the sacrifice of the mass was celebrated, the worshipers reflecting that "never before had this been done in this part of the world." After the mass they took upon their shoulders a great cross hewn out of a tree and advanced in order to the place appointed, where the governor and his assistants took part in its erection. The Catholics of the party, seeing this symbol of the faith erected in a new land, knelt upon the ground and recited the litanies of the cross in a kind of religious ecstasy. Here in another form was that tender attachment to their faith that one finds among the more devout Protestant exiles, and in the nobler natures there was doubtless that element of the heroic and the saintly often evolved in the religious sufferings and activities of that day—a relief to the pettiness of the debates and the irksomeness of the bigotries of the age.
XVI.
A Catholic colony. The colony had been named Maryland by King Charles in honor of his wife Henrietta Maria; at least there was assigned to the king responsibility for a name that, like nearly everything else about Maryland, was ambiguous. But the phrase Terra Mariæ in the charter, though represented there to be the equivalent of Maryland, was significant to a devout Catholic of something better than a compliment to a Catholic queen. Compare Clarke's Gladstone and Maryland Toleration. The Indian village which with its gardens and cornfields had been bought for the germinal settlement and capital, took the name of St. Mary's, and the whole infant colony is called the Colony of St. Maries, by its own Legislative Assembly in 1638, as though by Maryland were intended the land of Mary. Maryland Archives, i, 23. Notwithstanding the manifest care of the second Lord Baltimore to hold the missionaries within the limits of worldly prudence, the zealous fathers lived and labored in a spirit of other-worldliness. They set themselves first of all to convert those sheep without a shepherd, the Protestants of Maryland. Some of these appear to have been men of reckless and immoral lives, who were greatly bettered by an acceptance of religious restraint. Those non-Catholics who were ill, and those who found themselves languishing and dying in the wilderness without the consolations of their own religion, were zealously visited and converted in extremis by the Jesuits. The servants and mechanics employed by or apprenticed to the missionaries were brought under their constant influence and were readily won. Nearly all the Protestants who arrived in 1638 were swiftly brought over to the faith of the missionaries, and twelve converts were joyously reckoned as fruits of the Jesuit labors in 1639. There was more than one instance of the miraculous, or at least of the marvelous, to help on this work. One man of noble birth, who had by dissipation brought himself to desperate straits, and then sunk until he became at length a bond servant in Maryland, embraced Catholicism. After the death of this convert a very bright light was sometimes seen burning about his place of burial, and even those who were not Catholics were permitted to see this wonder. Excerpta de Diversis Literis, etc., 56-60. The horrible punishments that resulted from the Divine wrath against those who scoffingly rejected the Catholic faith in Maryland remind one of the equal calamities that befell those who were unfaithful to Puritanism in New England. Seventeenth-century Englishmen with sky-wide differences in opinion were one in the traits that belonged to their age. Father White was sure that the destruction of Indians in Maryland was specially ordered by God to provide an opening "for His own everlasting law and light"; but not more sure than were the Puritans that the cruel plague which exterminated whole villages on the Massachusetts coast was sent to open a way for the planting of Calvinistic churches. Each division of Christians in turn reduced the Almighty Creator to the level of a special tutelary divinity, sometimes to that of a rather vindictive genius of the place.
In this work of propagandism the missionaries did not forget the red men. Their labors among the aborigines were fairly successful at first, then interrupted by relapse and by war. Such is the history of Indian missions. Much was made of the solemn profession and baptism of an Indian "king," at which the governor and other distinguished men "honored by their presence the Christian sacraments," the governor marching behind the neophyte in the procession. Maryland was in fact openly a Catholic colony until after 1640. [Note 17.]