PROTESTANT THEORY OF PERSECUTION 187
suffered. Protestantism set up intolerance as an impera- tive precept and as a part of its doctrine, and it was forced to admit toleration by the necessities of its posi- tion, after the rigorous penalties it imposed had failed to arrest the process of internal dissolution. l At the time when this involuntary change occurred the sects that caused it \vere the bitterest enemies of the toleration they demanded. In the same age the Puritans and the Catholics sought a refuge beyond the Atlantic from the persecution which they suffered together under the Stuarts. Flying for the same reason, and from the same oppression, they were enabled respectively to carry out their own views in the colonies which they founded in Massachusetts and Maryland, and the history of those two States exhibits faithfully the contrast between the two Churches. The Catholic emigrants established, for the first time in modern history, a government in which religion was free, and with it the germ of that religious liberty which now prevails in America. The Puritans, on the other hand, revived with greater severity the penal laws of the mother country. In process of time the liberty of conscience in the Catholic colony was forcibly abolished by the neighbouring Protestants of Virginia; while on the borders of Massachusetts the new State of Rhode Island was formed by a party of fugitives from the intolerance of their fellow-colonists.
1 This is the ground taken by tv. 0 Dutch divines in answer to the consultation of John of Nassau in 1579: II Nt'que in imperio, neque in Galliis, neque in Belgio speranda esset un quam libertas in externo religion is exercitio nostris . . . si non diversarum religionum exercitia in una eademque provincia toleranda, . , . Sic igitur gladio adversus nos arrnabirnus Pontificios, si hanc hypothesin tuebimm. qnod exercitium religionis alteri parti nullum prorsus relinqui debeat" (ScrÙÚum Antiquarium, i. 335).
