ve been suicidal for the
Catholics, situated as they were, to attempt anything like persecution,
but Baltimore and the Catholics of Maryland for many generations deserve
none the less honour for the consistency with which they pursued their
tolerant policy. So long as the Catholics remained in control all sects
were not only tolerated but placed on a footing of complete equality
before the law, and as a fact both the Nonconformist persecuted in
Virginia and the Episcopalian persecuted in New England frequently found
refuge and peace in Catholic Maryland. The English Revolution of 1689
produced a change. The new English Government was pledged against the
toleration of a Catholicism anywhere. The representative of the
Baltimore family was deposed from the Governorship and the control
transferred to the Protestants, who at once repealed the edicts of
toleration and forbade the practice of the Catholic religion. They did
not, however, succeed in extirpating it, and to this day many of the old
Maryland families are Catholic, as are also a considerable proportion of
the Negroes. It may further be noted that, though the experiment in
religious equality was suppressed by violence, the idea seems never to
have been effaced, and Maryland was one of the first colonies to
accompany its demand for freedom with a declaration in favour of
universal toleration.

At about the same time that the persecuted Catholics found a refuge in
Maryland, a similar refuge was sought by the persecuted Puritans. A
number of these, who had found a temporary home in Holland, sailed
thence for America in the celebrated _Mayflower_ and colonized New
England on the Atlantic coast far to the north of the plantations of
Raleigh and Baltimore. From this root sprang the colonies of
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island, and later the
States of New Hampshire and Maine. It would be putting it with ironical
mildness to say that the Pilgrim Fathers did not imitate the tolerant
example of the Catholic refugees. Religious persecution had indeed been
practised by all parties in the quarrels of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; but for much of the early legislation of the
Puritan colonies one can find no parallel in the history of European
men. Calvinism, that strange fierce creed which Wesley so correctly
described as one that gave God the exact functions and attributes of the
devil, produced even in Europe a sufficiency of madness and horror; b