conflict for a hundred years in England. How were they
to live peaceably together in Maryland?

   To solve this problem Cecil Calvert built on ideas
current among Catholics in early seventeenth-century
England. There was no longer hope that England would
ever again be a Catholic country. English Catholics, it
was argued, should accept a position as a dissenting sect
and work to obtain toleration for all dissenters from the
Church of England. A person's religion should be his
private affair. The role of the state should be to preserve
civil order, not to enforce religious uniformity. Lord
Baltimore adapted these ideas to the circumstances of
his new colony. People of any religion were to be wel-
come in Maryland, and anyone otherwise qualified was
to be allowed to vote and hold office, regardless of reli-
gious beliefs. No one was to criticize another for his
religious practices or to proselytize for his own. Most
important of all—disastrously so, as it turned out—no
public taxation was to support any religious institution.
Church and state were to be totally separate.

   These were new approaches to ending religious strife,
but they arose from practical political realities, not from
clearly articulated points of view. The Calverts could
not forsee the difficulties inherent in adopting a policy
of toleration. If conflicts were to be avoided, both Cath-
olics and Protestants had to accept the idea that tolera-
tion was a principal of merit rather than an expedient of
the moment. Nor did the Calverts foresee that in the
absence of taxation for the support of churches and
ministers there would be very few of either for the Prot-
estants in Maryland. In the seventeenth-century world,
the absence of religious leadership and houses of wor-
ship was not acceptable. But, with a few lapses tolera-