capable of framing it, and it bears the character-mark of the Baltimore policy throughout. Here is no philosophic theory of toleration, no far-reaching conclusion like that of Roger Williams, that the magistrate may not take cognizance of merely religious offences. Williams was a thinker, a doctrinary, too far in advance of his age to be the successful organizer of a new state. Baltimore, on the other hand, accepted a practical toleration as an expedient--he may even have come to believe in it as a theory by force of his own situation. But he was not primarily a thinker at all. Even here, where Baltimorean toleration reaches high tide, no philosophic congruity is sought. The Jew and the Unitarian who deny the divinity of Christ are to be put to death. Only so much toleration is granted as is needful to the occasion. And even this toleration is not put upon any other ground than public policy; the forcing of conscience in religion "hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous consequence"; therefore this law is made "to preserve mutual love and amity amongst the inhabitants." The provisions against such offences as blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking and religious disputes precede those for toleration. Very politic is the arrangement by which reviling of God is made a capital offence, while reviling the Virgin Mary is adroitly associated with speeches against the "holy apostles or evangelists" as a sort of second-class blasphemy, a finable offence. [Sidenote: Vicissitudes of toleration.] And yet it was toleration, and the law was all the more influential as an example, perhaps, because it was only practical and quite incongruous. It was eminently prudent and statesmanlike. That it was not perpetually effective was the fault not of Baltimore but of the times. Puritan ideas were rampant. The government of the proprietary was overthrown; the Jesuits fled to the inhospitable Virginia, where they lived concealed in a low hut like a cistern or a tomb, not lamenting their physical privations so much as the lack of wine which deprived them of the consolation of the sacrament. The new government of Maryland, five years after Baltimore's famous "act concerning Religion," passed a new act with the same title--an act brusque and curt, a law with its boots and spurs on. "That none profess and exercise the papist religion" is its rude forbidding. The tables are turned; it is no longer the nonresident Jew and the hypothetical Unitarian who are excepted. But the wheels rolled swiftly once more, and in three years Cecilius, absolute lord and proprietary, was again master of Maryland, and the beneficent act of 1649 resumed its sway. It protected the Catholic element, which, though always rich and influential, came to be in latter colonial times but about a twelfth of the population. Toleration also served to make Maryland an early dwelling place for abounding Quakers and others holding religious views not relished in colonies less liberal. ELUCIDATIONS.