“It appears to me that Archbishop Manning has completely misapprehended the history of the settlement of Maryland and the establishment of toleration there for all believers in the Holy Trinity. It was a wise measure, for which the two Lords Baltimore, father and son, deserve the highest honor. But the measure was really defensive; and its main and very legitimate purpose plainly was to secure the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion. Immigration into the colony was by the charter free; and only by this and other popular provisions could the territory have been extricated from the grasp of its neighbors in Virginia, who claimed it as their own. It was apprehended that the Puritans would flood it, as they did; and it seemed certain that but for this excellent provision the handful of Roman Catholic founders would have been unable to hold their ground. The facts are given in Bancroft’s History of the United States, vol. i., chap. vii.”
Again, in his Preface to Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion, page viii., Mr. Gladstone writes:
“It has long been customary to quote the case of Maryland in proof that, more than two centuries ago, the Roman Catholic Church, where power was in its hands, could use it for the purposes of toleration. Archbishop Manning has repeated the boast, and with very large exaggeration.
“I have already shown from Bancroft’s History that in the case of Maryland there was no question of a merciful use of power towards others, but simply of a wise and defensive prudence with respect to themselves—that is to say, so far as the tolerant legislation of the colony was the work of Roman Catholics. But it does not appear to have been their work. By the fourth article of the charter we find that no church could be consecrated there except according to the laws of the church at home. The tenth article guaranteed to the colonists generally ‘all privileges, franchises, and liberties of this our kingdom of England.’ It was in 1649 that the Maryland Act of Toleration was passed, which, however, prescribed the punishment of death for any one who denied the Trinity. Of the small legislative body which passed it, two-thirds appear to have been Protestant, the recorded numbers being sixteen and eight respectively. The colony was open to the immigration of Puritans and all Protestants, and any permanent and successful oppression by a handful of Roman Catholics was altogether impossible. But the colonial act seems to have been an echo of the order of the House of Commons at home, on the 27th of October, 1645, that the inhabitants of the Summer Islands, and such others as shall join themselves to them, ‘shall without any molestation or trouble have and enjoy the liberty of their consciences in matters of God’s worship’; and of a British ordinance of 1647.
“Upon the whole, then, the picture of Maryland legislation is a gratifying one; but the historic theory which assigns the credit of it to the Roman Church has little foundation in fact.”
Let us first test Mr. Gladstone’s accuracy and consistency as a historical critic. He begins by alleging that the Maryland Toleration Act was a measure of defensive prudence in the interests of the Catholics themselves, and that “its main and very legitimate purpose plainly was to secure the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion.” He then asserts that this act of toleration was not the work of the Catholics at all, but of a Protestant majority in the legislature which passed it. We have, then, here presented the extraordinary picture of an alleged Protestant legislature passing a law which was really intended to protect Catholics against Protestant ascendency and apprehended Protestant persecution, and whose “main and very legitimate purpose was to secure the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion.” Surely, the Protestants of that day were liberal and generous, especially as it was an age of persecution, when not only were Catholics hunted down both in England and her Virginia and New England colonies, but even Protestants of different sects were relentlessly persecuting each other. And in what proper sense can they be said to have been Protestants with whom it was “a very legitimate purpose” to legislate in the express interests of Roman Catholics?
Mr. Gladstone also states that the Toleration Act was passed in the apprehension of an influx of Puritans, and to protect the colony “from the grasp of its neighbors in Virginia”; whereas his favorite author, Mr. Bancroft, informs Mr. Gladstone that Lord Baltimore invited both the Episcopalians of Virginia and the Puritans of New England into his domains, offering a gift of lands as an inducement; and it is a historical fact that numbers of them accepted the invitation.
Again, Mr. Gladstone, while apparently treating the Toleration Act as a Catholic measure, animadverts with evident disapproval on that feature in it which “prescribed the punishment of death for any one who denied the Trinity,” and then immediately he claims that the legislature which passed the act was a Protestant body—“two-thirds,” he writes, “appear to have been Protestants”—thus imposing upon his Protestant friends the odium of inflicting death for the exercise of conscience and religious belief; and that, too, not upon Papists, as they were not included in the punishment.
Mr. Gladstone, in The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance (page 83), expressing no doubt the common sentiments of Protestants since the time of Luther and Henry VIII., uses these irreverent words in regard to the Blessed Virgin Mary, that peerless and immaculate Lady whom four-fifths of the Christian world venerate as the Mother of God:
“The sinlessness of the Virgin Mary and the personal infallibility of the Pope are the characteristic dogmas of modern Romanism.… Both rest on pious fiction and fraud; both present a refined idolatry by clothing a pure humble woman and a mortal sinful man with divine attributes. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which exempts the Virgin Mary from sin and guilt, perverts Christianism into Marianism.… The worship of a woman is virtually substituted for the worship of Christ.”