The true glory of the first Maryland charter consists in the religious freedom which it recognizes; a freedom reasserted and enforced by an act of the Assembly in 1649, seventeen years after the charter passed the seals, when the whole realm of England was in commotion on account of the execution of the king and establishment of the commonwealth under Cromwell. To Lord Baltimore belongs the honor of being the first lawgiver in Christendom who made freedom of conscience the basis of a state constitution. There seems to be something paradoxical in the fact that an absolutist in political affairs should have been so democratic in matters of religion. But Baltimore was a latitudinarian; sagacious, farsighted, and awake to the best temporal interests of himself and his successors. He clearly perceived that the growth of his colony depended greatly upon the extent of religious freedom which might be guaranteed to emigrants. Persecution was overturning many peaceful [[[Baltimore's Toleration.--First Settlers.--Leonard Calvert.--Settlement at St. Mary's.]]] {397}homes in Great Britain; and, to wherever the light of toleration was seen, thousands of the oppressed made their way. He was exceedingly tolerant himself, or he never would have retained the friendship of James; and therefore his feelings and interests were coincident. His Catholic brethren were more or less persecuted in England; while the Puritans, who were peopling the coasts of Massachusetts Bay, had also been "harried out of the land" by the hierarchy. Maryland was made the asylum for the persecuted; not for Roman Catholics alone, but for the English Puritans, and the equally harassed reformers of Virginia, under the administration of the bigoted Berkeley. The first two hundred settlers, who came with Leonard Calvert (a) brother of Cecil, and first governor of the province, were principally Roman Catholics, but in a few [[ a 1633]] years Protestants became almost as numerous as they. These settled upon the unoccupied territory north of the Patuxent, and formed a new county which they called Severn, or Anne Arundel, extending nearly to the present site of Baltimore. "All the world outside of these portals [St. Michael's and St. Joseph's, as the first emigrants denominated the two headlands at the mouth of the Potomac, now Point Lookout, and Smith's Point] was intolerant, proscriptive, vengeful against the children of a dissenting faith. Only in Maryland, throughout this wide world of Christendom, was there an altar erected, and truly dedicated to the freedom of Christian worship." * Yet it must not be forgotten that, fifteen months before the charter of Maryland was executed, Roger Williams had sounded the trumpet of intellectual freedom in New England, and "it became his glory to found a state upon that principle, and to stamp himself upon its rising institutions, in characters so deep that the impress has remained to this day. **