Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land, forever on the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever inclined to find an excuse for everything they thought and did within the pages of the Old Testament. Cut off from polite human society and books, they began to develop a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes they had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon and soon became veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors of the west. They had nothing to reconcile them to their lives of hardship and drudgery except the conviction that they were suffering for the sake of the only true faith. Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other people must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of those who failed to share their own views, who suggested by implication that the Puritan way of doing and thinking was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully flogged and then driven into the wilderness or suffered the loss of their ears and tongues unless they were fortunate enough to find a refuge in one of the neighboring colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the Dutch. No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this colony achieved nothing except in that roundabout and involuntary fashion which is so common in the history of human progress. The very violence of their religious despotism brought about a reaction in favor of a more liberal policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny, there arose a new generation which was the open and avowed enemy of all forms of priest-rule, which believed profoundly in the desirability of the separation of state and church and which looked askance upon the ancestral admixture of religion and politics. By a stroke of good luck this development came about very slowly and the crisis did not occur until the period immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. As a result, the Constitution of the United States was written by men who were either freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned Calvinism and who incorporated into this document certain highly modern principles which have proved of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance of our republic. But ere this happened, the new world had experienced a most unexpected development in the field of tolerance and curiously enough it took place in a Catholic community, in that part of America now covered by the free state of Maryland.