's figures were doubtless at fault; but Lord Baltimore himself
writes that the nonconformists outnumber the Catholics and those of the
Church of England together about three to one, and that the churchmen
are much more numerous than the Catholics.

After the Revolution of 1688 it is not strange that a like movement was
set on foot in Maryland. The "beneficent despotism" of the Calverts,
notwithstanding every concession on their part, was ended for the time
by the efforts of an "Association for the Defense of the Protestant
Religion," and Maryland became a royal colony. Under the new regime it
was easier to inflict annoyances and disabilities on the petty minority
of the Roman Catholics than to confer the privileges of an established
church on the hardly more considerable minority of Episcopalians. The
Church of England became in name the official church of the colony, but
two parties so remotely unlike as the Catholics and the Quakers combined
successfully to defeat more serious encroachments on religious liberty.
The attempt to maintain the church of a small minority by taxes extorted
by a foreign government from the whole people had the same effect in
Maryland as in Ireland: it tended to make both church and government
odious. The efforts of Dr. Thomas Bray, commissary of the Bishop of
London, a man of true apostolic fervor, accomplished little in
withstanding the downward tendency of the provincial establishment. The
demoralized and undisciplined clergy resisted the attempt of the
provincial government to abate the scandal of their lives, and the
people resisted the attempt to introduce a bishop. The body thus set
before the people as the official representative of the religion of
Christ "was perhaps as contemptible an ecclesiastical organization as
history can show," having "all the vices of the Virginian church,
without one of its safeguards or redeeming qualities."[62:1] The most
hopeful sign in the morning sky of the eighteenth century was to be
found in the growth of the Society of Friends and the swelling of the
current of the Scotch-Irish immigration. And yet we shall have proof
that the life-work of Commissary Bray, although he went back discouraged
from his labors in Maryland and although this colony took little direct
benefit from his efforts in England, was destined to have great results
in the advancement of the kingdom of Christ in America; for he was the
founder of the Society for the Propagation of the