But although they had now escaped the dangers of drowning and seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous position. Most of them came from small cities in the heart of England and had little aptitude for a life of pioneering. Their communistic ideas were shattered by the cold, their civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and their wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food. And, finally, the few who survived the first three winters, good-natured people accustomed to the rough and ready tolerance of the home country, were entirely swamped by the arrival of thousands of new colonists who without exception belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was to remain for several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles River.
Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land, forever on the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever inclined to find an excuse for everything they thought and did within the pages of the Old Testament. Cut off from polite human society and books, they began to develop a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes they had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon and soon became veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors of the west. They had nothing to reconcile them to their lives of hardship and drudgery except the conviction that they were suffering for the sake of the only true faith. Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other people must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of those who failed to share their own views, who suggested by implication that the Puritan way of doing and thinking was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully flogged and then driven into the wilderness or suffered the loss of their ears and tongues unless they were fortunate enough to find a refuge in one of the neighboring colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the Dutch.
No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this colony achieved nothing except in that roundabout and involuntary fashion which is so common in the history of human progress. The very violence of their religious despotism brought about a reaction in favor of a more liberal policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny, there arose a new generation which was the open and avowed enemy of all forms of priest-rule, which believed profoundly in the desirability of the separation of state and church and which looked askance upon the ancestral admixture of religion and politics.
By a stroke of good luck this development came about very slowly and the crisis did not occur until the period immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. As a result, the Constitution of the United States was written by men who were either freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned Calvinism and who incorporated into this document certain highly modern principles which have proved of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance of our republic.
But ere this happened, the new world had experienced a most unexpected development in the field of tolerance and curiously enough it took place in a Catholic community, in that part of America now covered by the free state of Maryland.
The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting experiment, were of Flemish origin, but the father had moved to England and had rendered very distinguished services to the house of Stuart. Originally they had been Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and general utility man to King James I, had become so utterly disgusted with the futile theological haggling of his contemporaries that he returned to the old faith. Good, bad or indifferent, it called black, black and white, white and did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.
This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts. His back-sliding (a very serious offense in those days!) did not lose him the favor of his royal master. On the contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore and was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to establish a little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted Catholics. First, he tried his luck in Newfoundland. But his settlers were frozen out of house and home and his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square miles in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian, would have naught of such dangerous neighbors and Baltimore then asked for a slice of that wilderness which lay between Virginia and the Dutch and Swedish possessions of the north. Ere he received his charter he died. His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the winter of 1633-1634 two little ships, the Ark and the Dove, under command of Leonard Calvert, brother to George, crossed the ocean, and in March of 1634 they safely landed their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor of Mary, daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose plans for a European League of Nations had been cut short by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife to that English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head at the hands of his Puritan subjects.
This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its Indian neighbors and offered equal opportunities to both Catholics and Protestants passed through many difficult years. First of all it was overrun by Episcopalians who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans in Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia. And the two groups of fugitives, with the usual arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard to introduce their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which might give rise to religious passions” were expressly forbidden on Maryland territory, the older colonists were entirely within their right when they bade both Episcopalians and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards war broke out in the home country between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads and the Marylanders feared that, no matter who should win, they would lose their old freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them, and at the direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed their famous Act of Tolerance which, among other things, contained this excellent passage:
“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of religion has often produced very harmful results in those communities in which it was exercised, for the more tranquil and pacific government in this province and for the better preservation of mutual love and unity among its inhabitants, it is hereby decided that nobody in this province who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molested or persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his religion or the free exercise thereof.”