Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ... lawgivers were thwarted and made nugatory, not only by local enactments, but by an ineradicable bigotry, which even legal claims could not override. What William Penn, the most august and imposing figure of colonial times, could not succeed in bringing to the minds and hearts of the American people, a less devout man but more adroit statesman, Thomas Jefferson, finally engrafted on the constitution of the country. Could the former have brought his conceptions of universal toleration, civil and religious, to a successful termination, which, handicapped as he was by local obstacles and hereditary prejudices, seemed almost impossible, he would literally deserve the title of " emancipator," which now an admiring and grateful posterity can only acclaim him figuratively. The evolution of religious toleration, from the vague promises held out by pioneers in this country, to its full and radiant accomplishment after nearly two centuries of strife and opposition, is a story particularly interesting to the Catholic. From the settlement of Virginia, in 1609, down to the period of the American Revolution, a man's full enjoyment or complete abridgement of his civil rights was entirely dependent on his ready conformity to the established religion dominant in the Province in which he lived. The humane enactments of a Lord Baltimore, a Roger Williams and a William Penn, on which the most fulsome praise is lavished, and which even then made the heart of humanity throb in admiration and pride, left no trace or vestige on colonial legislation. During the entire colonial period the Catholic was almost as much an alien, disfranchised and scorned, in this boasted land of liberty, as he was in his native country, from which he fled with a view of escaping the...