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 colony had been named Maryland by King Charles in honor of his
wife Henrietta Maria; at least there was assigned to the king
responsibility for a name that, like nearly everything else about
Maryland, was ambiguous. But the phrase _Terra Mariæ_ in the charter,
though represented there to be the equivalent of Maryland, was
significant to a devout Catholic of something better than a compliment
to a Catholic queen. The Indian village which with its gardens and
cornfields had been bought for the germinal settlement and capital,
took the name of St. Mary's, and the whole infant colony is called the
Colony of St. Maries, by its own Legislative Assembly in 1638, as
though by Maryland were intended the land of Mary. Notwithstanding the
manifest care of the second Lord Baltimore to hold the missionaries
within the limits of worldly prudence, the zealous fathers lived and
labored in a spirit of other-worldliness. They set themselves first of
all to convert those sheep without a shepherd, the Protestants of
Maryland. Some of these appear to have been men of reckless and
immoral lives, who were greatly bettered by an acceptance of religious
restraint. Those non-Catholics who were ill, and those who found
themselves languishing and dying in the wilderness without the
consolations of their own religion, were zealously visited and
converted _in extremis_ by the Jesuits. The servants and mechanics
employed by or apprenticed to the missionaries were brought under
their constant influence and were readily won. Nearly all the
Protestants who arrived in 1638 were swiftly brought over to the faith
of the missionaries, and twelve converts were joyously reckoned as
fruits of the Jesuit labors in 1639. There was more than one instance
of the miraculous, or at least of the marvelous, to help on this work.
One man of noble birth, who had by dissipation brought himself to
desperate straits, and then sunk until he became at length a bond
servant in Maryland, embraced Catholicism. After the death of this
convert a very bright light was sometimes seen burning about his place
of burial, and even those who were not Catholics were permitted to see
this wonder. The horrible punishments that resulted from the Divine
wrath against those who scoffingly rejected the Catholic faith in
Maryland remind one of the equal calamities that befell those who
were unfaithful to Puritanism in New England. Seventeenth-century
Englishmen with sky-wide differences in opinion were one in the traits
that belonged to their age. Father White was sure that the destruction
of Indians in Maryland was specially ordered by God to provide an
opening "for His own everlasting law and light"; but not more sure
than were the Puritans that the cruel plague which exterminated whole
villages on the Massachusetts coast was sent to open a way for the
planting of Calvinistic churches. Each division of Christians in turn
reduced the Almighty Creator to the level of a special tutelary
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account