“ MARYLAND was the first Proprietary colony established in America; and its charter contained a more ample grant of power than was bestowed upon any other English colony. To Maryland also belongs the honor of having been the first government which proclaimed and practised religious toleration. The charter was granted in 1632, by Charles I., to Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore. But the true founder of Maryland was George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, a man of singular merit, whose influence upon the fortunes of the colony was such that his character and career belong to its history. ”

“ More than once during that period of one and a half centuries there were not only reasonable fears, but actual evidences, that a renewed subjection to the perfectly restored thraldom of Rome might, in what seemed to be merely the cast of a die, befall the distracted realm of England. The Court, Council, and Parliament pulsated in regular or irregular beats between Romanism and Protestantism. Henry VIII. left the work of reform embittered in its spirit for both parties, unaccomplished, insecure, and with no settlement by fixed principles. ”

“ Whatever may be granted or denied to the well-worn plea that the King’s reformatory zeal was inspired by his feud with the Pope about his matrimonial infelicities, it is evident that, notwithstanding the unrestrained royal prerogative, the monarch could not have struck at the very basis of all ecclesiastical rule and order in his kingdom, had there not been not only in his Council and Parliament, but also working among all orders of the people, a spirit and resolve against the Papal rule and discipline, ready to enter upon the unsounded and perilous ventures of radical reformation. ”

“ The New York Assembly met in October. Its first act bore the title of “The Charter of Liberties and Privileges granted by his Royal Highness to the Inhabitants of New York and its dependencies.” The supreme legislative authority, under the King and the Duke, was vested in a governor, council, and “the people met in general assembly;” the sessions, triennial as in England; franchise, free to every freeholder; the law, that of England in its most liberal provisions; freedom of conscience and religion to all peaceable persons “which profess faith in God by Jesus Christ.” ”

“ On the 30th of November, 1675, died Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, after having inscribed his name upon one of the fairest pages in the history of America. The magnificent heritage left him by his father was beset with difficulties; but his courage, perseverance, and skill had triumphed over the hostility of Virginia and the intrigues of Clayborne, over domestic insurrection and Puritan hatred. The first ruler who established and maintained religious toleration is entitled to enduring honor in the eyes of posterity. ”

“ The foremost man in the colony for this long period, nature and opportunity equally fitted him to be its chronicler from the beginning. No one could speak with more authority than he of the inner motives and guiding policy of the original colonists,—fortunately, also, no one could exemplify more clearly in written words the ideal Pilgrim than does Bradford, with his grave, homely, earnest style, not unsuggestive of the English of the Bible. ”

“ The confederation of the United Colonies, first proposed by Connecticut, was an act of great wisdom, foreshadowing the more celebrated political unions of the English race on this continent, for they all have recognized the common maxim, that “Union is strength.” The colonists were surrounded by “people of several nations and strange language,” and the existence of the Indian tribes within the boundaries of the New England settlements was the source of ceaseless anxiety and alarm. ”

“ It is vexing to the spirit, while winning sometimes our admiration for the intense and awful sincerity of the self-inflicting victims of their own scruples, magnified into compunctions of conscience, to trace the quarrels and leave-takings of those poor exiles on the Continent, struggling in toil and sacrifice for a bare subsistence, but finding compensation if not solace in their endless and ever-sharpening altercations. ”

“ Strachey distinctly says of the Popham Colony, that mining was “the main intended benefit expected.”
It is susceptible of proof that the blood of the Pilgrims and of their congeners runs through the veins of a large part of the population of New England to-day. No genealogical tree has been produced which connects our present life with a single one of the Sabino party. How, then, was New England saved for the English race? The decisive historical event is never those scattering forerunners which always harbinger an epoch, but the fulfilment of the idea which comes in the ripeness of time. ”

“ It was really in the churches of the English exiles in Holland that the ultimate principles of Independency and Congregationalism were wrought out, to be asserted and so manfully stood for both in Old and in New England. Indeed, the essential principles of largest toleration and of equality, save in civil functions, had been established in Holland in 1572, before the coming of the English exiles. ”

“ To it was intrusted all the honor, reverence, obedience, and transcendent responsibility in the life, the hope, and the salvation of men, which had but recently been given, in awe and dread, to a now dishonored and repudiated Church, against which scorn and contempt and hate could hardly enough embitter reproach and invective. With that Book in hand, men and women, than whom there have never lived those more earnest and sincere, sat down in absorbed soul-devotion, to exercise their own thinking on the highest subjects, to decide each for himself what he could make of it. ”

“ The aim of Prelatists, Conformists, and clerical and civil magistrates in religion, to bring all into a common belief and ritual, was hopeless from the start. It made no allowance for the rooted varieties and divergencies in nature, taste, sensibility, judgment, and conscience in individuals who were anything more than animated clods. How was it possible for one born and furnished in the inner man to be a Quaker, to be manufactured into a Churchman? ”

“ Long before that enactment, at a time when intolerance and martyrdom was almost the law of Christendom, and while the annals of the other colonies of the New World were being stained with the record of crimes committed in the name of religion, in Maryland the doctrine of religious liberty was clearly proclaimed and practised. It is the imperishable glory of Lord Baltimore and of the State. For the first time in the history of [531] the world there was a regularly constituted government under which all Christians possessed equal rights. All churches were tolerated, none was established. ”

“ It is always to be remembered that every national-church establishment existing among Protestants is the creation of the civil authority. Its inclusion and its exclusion, the privileges and disabilities which it gives or imposes, its titles of honor or reproach, are the awards of secular magistrates. All ecclesiastical polity, outside of Scriptural rule and sanction, receives its authority, for those who accept and for those who reject it, from the extension of the temporal power into the province of religion. ”

“ About this time that poorly known character, Sir Richard Vines, passed a winter on the coast, probably at Saco, sleeping in the cabins of the Indians, and escaping the great plague, which swept away so many of the Sagamores. The winter fisheries were commonly pursued, and the presence of Englishmen on the coast all the year round was no doubt a common thing, while a trading-post must have been maintained at Pemaquid. Rocroft finally sailed to Virginia, where he wrecked his vessel, and then lost his life in a brawl. Thus suddenly this “gallant soldier” dropped out of New England history. ”

“ Daniel Coxe of London, already a large proprietor, having purchased the whole of Byllynge’s interest from his heirs, after consultation with the principal Proprietors in England, decided to assume the government of the Province himself. But while he thus assumed, in his own person, rights which the people had claimed as theirs, he did not refrain from granting to them a liberal exercise of power, giving assurances that all reasonable expectations and requests would be complied with, and that the officers who had been chosen by the people should be continued in their several positions. ”

“ When the Press in such periods is pouring its outflow of ephemeral tracts and books, vigorous, intense, effective, as they may be for a temporary end or for the circle of a sect or party, genius or scholarly culture, or a philosophical and comprehensive spirit, penetrating below the surface and rising above the details of a controversy, will engage itself upon the product of what we call an immortal work. ”

“ That fact is, that in multitudes of occasional utterances, sermons, journals, and historical sketches, many of the descendants of the first comers laid more exclusive and emphatic stress upon the prime agency of religion in the enterprise than did the first movers in it. When ministers and magistrates in after years uttered their frequent and sombre laments over the degeneracy of the times, the decay of zeal and godliness, and the falling from the first love, the refrain always was found in extolling the one, single, supreme aim of the fathers as that of pure piety. ”

“ The arm of England was long, but her hand lay lightly on the American continent. The extent of coast and frontier was too great to be successfully watched, and the necessities of the colonies too many and imperious for them to resist the temptation to a trade which, though illicit, was hardly held immoral except by the strictest constructionists of statute law; and it was with the Dutch that this trade was actively continued by their English neighbors of Maryland and Virginia, as well as by those of New England. ”

“ And here is the point at which we should define to ourselves, as intelligently and fairly as we can from our abounding authentic sources of information, precisely what was the influence or agency of religion in the first emigration to New England. We are familiar with the oft-reiterated and positive statement, that the enterprise would neither have been undertaken, nor persisted in, nor led on to success, had not religion furnished its mainspring, its guiding motive, and the end aimed at, to be in degree realized. ”

“ English Authorities.—All such periods of intense controversy and struggle upon themes of the highest concern to man, as that of the internal commotions in England immediately following and consequent upon the Reformation, leave behind them some memorial in literature of so conspicuous and rare an excellence as to insure perpetual freshness, and to acquire interest and attractions even beyond that of the particular subject with which it deals. ”

“ If, however, zeal or curiosity should dispose any one to peer through those dried and withered relics of the old polemics of a generation that drew its honey from the rocks, he will find much occasion to respect the acuteness and the persistency of men who, having taken the interests of their creed and piety into their own hands, determined to build on what was to them the only sure foundation. ”

“ The theories in accordance with which northwestern explorations were first undertaken were unsound, and the objects by which they were inspired found realization long ago in quite other ways. But not the less did those theories and those objects animate men with a zeal and self-sacrifice worthy of the Crusades, and produce results of great importance. No easier route to China and Japan was discovered to enrich the fortunate adventurers; no valuable territories were added to the realm of England; and it was an utterly barren sovereignty which Frobisher and his successors claimed. ”

“ Nor did the West India Company seem ever to comprehend that their hold upon the new continent could be maintained only by well-ordered and continuous colonization. Rapidly enriched by their intercourse with the natives of the sunny climes in which they established their strong posts for trade, they seem to have looked for no more from their posts on the North American coast, or to have had further ambition than to secure their share of the trade in furs, in which they were met by the active rivalry and greater enterprise of the French settlers on the Canadian frontier. ”

“ The others, after a long and stormy passage, arrived in England on the 25th of January, 1568/69.
It is a real misfortune for our early history that no reliance can be placed on the fragmentary stories of the few survivors who were left by Hawkins on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. One or two there were who, after years of captivity, told their wretched story at home. But it is so disfigured by every form of lie, that the most ingenious reconstructer of history fails to distil from it even a drop of the truth. ”