If we would understand the history of our country, we must not lose sight of the religious character of the men by whom it was explored and colonized. Religious zeal led the Puritans to New England, the Catholics to Maryland, and the Quakers to Pennsylvania; and among the Spaniards and the French there were many who, like Columbus and Champlain, deemed the salvation of a soul of greater moment than the conquest of an empire. We might, indeed, without going beyond our present subject, speak of the heroic and gentle lives of the apostolic men who, from Maine to California, from Florida to the Northern Lakes, toiled among the Indians, and not in vain, that they might win them from savage ways and lift them up to higher modes of life. The Catholics of the United States can never forget that the labors of these men belong to the history of the church on this continent; that the lives they offered up, the blood they shed, plead for us before God; and that if their work is disappearing, it sinks into the grave only with the dying race which they more than all others have loved and served. But in this age men are little inclined to dwell upon memories, however glorious. We live in the present and in the future, and, in spite of much cheap sentiment and wordy philanthropy, we have but weak sympathy with decaying races. We are interested in what is or is to be, not in what has been; and perhaps it is well that this is so. We have but
feeble power to think or act or love, and it should not be wasted. If Americans to-day are busy with thoughts of a hundred years ago, it is not that they love those old times and their simple ways, but that by contrast they may, in boastful self-complacency, glory in the present. They look back, not to regret the fast-receding shore, but to congratulate themselves that they have left it already so far behind. It is enough, then, to have alluded to the labors of the Catholic missionaries among the North American Indians, since those labors have had and can have but small influence upon the history of the church in the United States. To understand this history we need only study that of the Europeans and their descendants on this continent.
The early colonists of the present territory of the United States were as unlike in their religious as in their national characters. English Puritans founded the colonies of New England; New York was settled by the Dutch; Delaware and New Jersey by the Dutch and the Swedes; Pennsylvania by Quakers from England, who were followed by a German colony. Virginia was the home of the English who adhered to the Established Church of the mother country, and North Carolina became the refuge of the Nonconformists from Virginia; in South Carolina a considerable number of Huguenots found an asylum; and in Maryland the first settlers were chiefly English Catholics. Nearly all these colonies owed their foundation to the religious troubles of Europe. The Puritans, the Catholics, and the Quakers were more eager to find a home in which they could freely worship God than to amass wealth.
The religious spirit of New England,
whose influence in this country, before and since the Revolution, has been preponderant, was as narrow and proscriptive as it was intense, and a gloomy fanaticism lay at the basis of its entire political and social system. The Puritan colonies were not so much bodies politic as churches in the wilderness. To the commission appointed to draw up a body of laws to serve as a declaration of rights, Cotton Mather declared that God’s people should be governed by no other laws than those which He himself had given to Moses; and one of the first acts of the Massachusetts colony was the expulsion of John and Samuel Browne with their followers, because they refused to conform to the religious practices of the Pilgrims. If dissenting Protestants were not tolerated in New England, Catholics certainly could not hope for mercy; and, in fact, they were denied religious liberty even in Rhode Island, which had been founded by the victims of Puritan persecution as a refuge for the oppressed and a protest against fanaticism. Though Mr. Bancroft, whose partisan zeal, whenever there is question of New England, is unmistakable, denies that this unjust discrimination was the act of the people of Rhode Island, it served, at any rate, so effectually to exclude Catholics that when the war of independence broke out not one was to be found within the limits of the colony.
Puritanism, more than any other form of Protestantism, drew its very life from a hatred of all that is Catholic. The office and authority of bishops, the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, the sign of the cross, the chant of the psalms, the observance of saints’ days, the use of musical instruments in church, and
the vestments worn by the ministers of religion were all odious to the Puritans because they were associated with Catholic worship; and in their eyes the chief crime of the Church of England was that she still retained some of the doctrines and usages of that of Rome. Religion and freedom, though their conception of both was partial and false, were the predominant passions of the Puritans; and since they looked upon the Catholic Church as the fatal enemy alike of religion and of freedom, their fanaticism, not less than their enthusiastic love of independence, filled them with the deepest hatred for Catholics. They had the virtues and the vices of the lower and more ignorant classes of Englishmen, from which for the most part they had sprung. If they were frugal, content with little, ready to bear hardship and to suffer want, not easily cast down, they were also narrow, superstitious, angular, and unlovely; and these characteristics were hardened by a cold, gloomy, and unsympathetic religious faith. The credulity which led them to hang witches made them ready to believe in the diabolism of priests; while the narrowness of their intellectual range rendered them incapable of perceiving the grandeur and excellence of an organization which alone, in the history of the world, has become universal without becoming weak, and which, if it be considered as only human, is still man’s most wonderful work. With the æsthetic beauty of the Catholic religion they could have no sympathy, since they were deprived of the sense by which alone it can be appreciated. Though they fasted, appointed days of thanksgiving, and, through a false asceticism, changed the Lord’s day into the Jewish
Sabbath, the fasts and saints’ days of Catholics were in their eyes the superstitions of idolaters; and while they assumed the right to declare what is true Christian doctrine and to enforce its acceptance, they indignantly rejected the spiritual authority of the church, though historically traceable to Christ’s commission to the apostles.
The measures, therefore, which the colonies of New England took to prevent the establishment of the Catholic Church on their soil, were merely the expression of the horror and dread of what they conceived its influence and tendency to be. In 1631, just eleven years after the landing of the Mayflower, Sir Christopher Gardiner, on mere suspicion of being a papist, was seized and sent out of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, and in the same year the General Court wrote a letter denouncing the minister at Watertown for giving expression to the opinion that the Church of Rome is a true church. Three years later Roger Williams, whose tolerant temper has been an exhaustless theme of praise, joined with the Puritans in declaring the cross a “relic of Antichrist, a popish symbol savoring of superstition and not to be countenanced by Christian men”; and, in proof of the sincerity of their zeal, these godly men cut the cross from out the English flag. Priests were forbidden, under pain of imprisonment and even death, to enter the colonies; and the neighboring Catholic settlements of Canada were regarded with sentiments of such bigoted hatred as to blind the Puritans to their own most evident political and commercial interests. So unrelenting was their fanaticism that one of the grievances which they most strongly urged against
George III. was that he tolerated popery in Canada. In the New England colonies, down to 1776, the Catholic Church had no existence, and the same may be said of the other colonies, with the exception of Maryland and of a few families scattered through parts of Pennsylvania. In Maryland itself, where the principles of religious liberty, which now form a part of the organic law of the land, had been first proclaimed by the Catholic colonists, the persecution of the church early became an important feature in the colonial legislation. In successive enactments the Catholics were forbidden to teach school, to hold civil office, and to have public worship; and were, moreover, taxed for the support of the Established Church. The religious character of Virginia, though less intense and earnest than that of New England, can hardly be said to have been less anti-Catholic; and it is therefore not surprising that we should find the cruel penal code of the mother country in full vigor in this colony.