The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
The Puritans when using a geographical name that began with the word
"saint" scrupulously uncanonized it by leaving off the prefix. But
these devout pilgrims of the Roman faith, when once the saints and
guardian angels of Maryland had piloted them safe in spite of the
malice of storm spirits and evil genii into landlocked waters and the
bounds of Lord Baltimore's grant, proceeded to sanctify the whole
region by sprinkling it with the names of saints and angels from
Michael the archangel downward. The ancient Indian designations were
marks of a heathenism they purposed to overthrow, and they began by
trying to get rid of the whole "bead roll of unbaptized names." No
convenient island, creek, river, bay, or cape escaped Christian
baptism. On Annunciation Day, 1634, they landed on Heron Island, in
the Potomac, which they named appropriately for St. Clement, who was
martyred by being thrown into the sea attached to an anchor, and here
the sacrifice of the mass was celebrated, the worshipers reflecting
that "never before had this been done in this part of the world."
After the mass they took upon their shoulders a great cross hewn out
of a tree and advanced in order to the place appointed, where the
governor and his assistants took part in its erection. The
Catholics of the party, seeing this symbol of the faith erected in a
new land, knelt upon the ground and recited the litanies of the cross
in a kind of religious ecstasy. Here in another form was that tender
attachment to their faith that one finds among the more devout
Protestant exiles, and in the nobler natures there was doubtless that
element of the heroic and the saintly often evolved in the religious
sufferings and activities of that day--a relief to the pettiness of
the debates and the irksomeness of the bigotries of the age.
XVI.
[Sidenote: A Catholic colony.]
[Sidenote: Compare Clarke's Gladstone and Maryland Toleration.]
[Sidenote: Maryland Archives, i, 23.]
[Sidenote: Excerpta de Diversis Literis, etc., 56-60.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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