They were fellow countrymen. Each had great natural gifts, mental acquirements, and uncommon literary power. St. Francis lived a century before Voltaire, and, therefore, nearer to what would now be called those traditions of bigotry from which Voltaire helped so much to set us free. Yet the latter let his pen splutter on all who dared to differ from him; the former in all his controversies dressed his arguments with honey instead of vinegar. That charity which disposes one to see good faith and honesty of purpose in persons in spite of their errors, is the only true source whence the spirit of toleration must flow into civil society. Toleration coming from any other source can give no guarantee of permanence; for it begins with expediency, and ends with it. But the toleration which separates a man’s sincerity from his possible errors, and which in civil life ignores the latter for the sake of the former, is founded on principle, and is above expediency or the changing combination of human affairs. The sincerity of a man who professes tolerance of principles which he believes to be false is to be suspected; he should be taken as one who is practically indifferent to truth or error. One can rely on the fidelity of him who professes tolerance of others, in spite of some personal views of theirs which he abhors, because of the sincerity with which, as he presumes, they entertain those views. But if they should so obtrude those views into public life as to affect the rights of him who repudiates them, it becomes another matter. That would be an aggression on the civil rights of others; and no person should let himself be made a victim in the name of toleration. Now, it is a significant fact that Catholic Maryland, before American Independence came, was the one State in America in which no person had to suffer civil disabilities for conscience sake. Members of Protestant sects who had to fly from the intolerance of more powerful Protestant sects in New England States always found toleration and a home there. Bancroft, the Protestant historian of the United States, writes of Maryland: “Its history is the history of benevolence, gratitude, and toleration. The Catholics who were oppressed by the laws of England were sure to find a peaceful asylum in the quiet harbours of the Chesapeake, and there, too, Protestants were sheltered from Protestant intolerance.” It is an equally significant fact that later on the non-Catholics of Maryland, in the day of their power, placed grievous disabilities on the children of those Catholics who had given their exiled fathers a refuge in their hour of need.