regarded the treaty with no enthusiasm.

RELIGIOUS TOLERATION PROCLAIMED IN MARYLAND

A.D. 1649

G. L. DAVIS

Whatever peculiar credit may belong to the first colonists in
other parts of North America for their services to human rights
and liberty, it remains the signal glory of the Maryland
founders to have established, almost at the beginning of their
enterprise, the principle and practice of religious tolerance,
at least within the limits of Christian faith.

From the planting of the colony by Cecilius Calvert, an English
Roman Catholic, in 1633, to the formal enactment of
"Toleration" was only sixteen years, but the colonists were
fully ripened for the step when it was taken. Their new
settlement had, in fact, begun "with Catholic and Protestant
dwelling together in harmony, neither attempting to interfere
with the religious rights of the other, 'and religious liberty
obtained a home, its only home in the wide world, at the humble
village which bore the name of St. Mary's.'"

The charter of Maryland was a compact between a member of the English
and a disciple of the Roman Church; between an Anglo-Catholic king and a
Roman Catholic noble; between Charles I of England and Cecilius, the
second Baron of Baltimore, and the First Lord Proprietary of Maryland.
To the confessors of each faith it was the pledge of religious freedom.
If not the form, it had the spirit and substance, of a _concordat_, in a
sense quite as strong as any of those earlier charters of the English
crown, to which the chief priest of Rome was, in any respect, a party.
This is the inference faithfully drawn from a view of the instrument
itself; from a consideration of the facts and circumstances attending
the grant; and from a study of the various interpretations, essays, and
histories of the many discourses and other publications which have
appeared upon this prolific theme. It accounts for the prohibition of
any construction of the charter inconsistent with the "true Christian
religion."[36] This in a grant to the Roman Catholic Proprietary is
intended doubtless as a simple security for the members of the English
Church.

It suggests the reason, also, why the obligation to establish the
religion of Englishmen was omitted in the case of Maryland, but
expressly or tacitly imposed, either by the charters or by the orders
given to most, if not all, of the other