The Act imposed an annual tax of forty pounds of tobacco per poll on all taxables for the purpose of building churches, and maintaining the clergy. In 1702 it was re-enacted with a toleration clause: “Protestant Dissenters and Quakers were exempted from the penalties and disabilities, and might have separate meeting-houses, provided that they paid their forty pounds per poll to support the Established Church. As for the ‘Papists,’ it is needless to say that there was no exemption nor license for them.”[311]
The author then sets before us the three kinds of toleration, like three portraits, so that their distinctive features appear in bold relief.
“We may now,” he says, “place side by side the three tolerations of Maryland.”
The toleration of the (Catholic) Proprietaries lasted fifty years, and under it all believers in Christ were equal before the law, and all support to churches or ministers was voluntary.
The Puritan toleration lasted six years, and included all but Papists, Prelatists and those who held objectional doctrines.
The Anglican toleration lasted eighty years, and had glebes and churches for the Establishment, connivance for Dissenters, the penal laws for Catholics, and for all, the forty per poll.
In fact, an additional turn was given to the screw in this year; the oath of “abhorrency,” a more offensive form of the oath of supremacy, being required, beside the oath of allegiance, and for one thing, no Catholic attorney was allowed to practise in the Province.[312]
When the members of the Constitutional Convention declared in 1787, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” it is worthy of note that they were echoing the sentiments, and even repeating the language of the Maryland Assembly of 1649, which declared that “No person whatsoever within this Province, professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall from henceforth be any ways molested for his or her religion, nor in the free exercise thereof.”
We may therefore affirm that Lord Baltimore's Toleration Act of 1649 was the bright dawn that ushered in the noon-day sun of freedom in 1787. And we have every reason to believe that the Proprietary's charter of liberty with its attendant blessings, served as an example, an incentive, and an inspiration to some at least of the framers of the Constitution, to extend over the new Republic, the precious boon of civil and religious liberty.
It is proper to also observe that the Act of 1649 was not a new declaration of religious freedom on the part of Lord Baltimore's administration, but was a solemn affirmation of the toleration granted by the Catholic Proprietary from the beginning of the Settlement in 1634.