No Monument Wanted

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 21, 1910

No Monument Wanted

RECENTLY there has been a proposition made by the Roman Catholics in Baltimore that a memorial should be erected in honor of Lord Baltimore, and that it shall be as well a monument to religious liberty, of which the titled gentleman to be honored is claimed by his Baltimore coreligionists to have been the first and most brilliant colonial apostle.

Since this question has been proposed, there has been carried on in the Baltimore press quite a lively discussion over the matter.

Among those who have discussed the question is Elder C. B. Haynes, the religious liberty secretary of the Chesapeake Conference. The following from his pen appeared in the Baltimore American of a recent date:—

“As secretary of the Maryland and Delaware Department of the Religious Liberty Bureau, a national organization, having branches in every State, I desire vigorously to protest against certain statements made by Cardinal Gibbons in his letter to you relative to the design of the proposed monument to religious toleration. It is a perversion of the historical facts in the case to claim that any Catholic or the Catholic Church ever introduced religious liberty into the State of Maryland or any other State or nation on earth. The only relation that the Catholic Church has ever assumed toward the great principle of religious freedom is that of an antagonist, and this attitude has been persisted in throughout all the centuries of its history. There should be, therefore, no memorial erected to Lord Baltimore as representing the position of Rome, for if Lord Baltimore favored religious liberty, he was a very bad Catholic. There is no need for any mistake concerning this whatever, as the decrees and pronouncements of the Church of Rome on this subject may be easily procured by any one. They, without exception, are all opposed to religious liberty.

“On the other hand, Cardinal Gibbons is absolutely correct in suggesting that no credit is due either to the Church of England or to the Puritans. The religious despotism and intolerance manifested by the Puritans in Massachusetts colony was as great as was ever manifested by Rome, though it continued for a much shorter time. The claim that the Puritans should be honored because they espoused the cause of religious liberty is utterly absurd, as the poor Quakers have good cause to remember.

“Furthermore, no monument should ever be erected in America to memorialize the principle of religious toleration, and this is so because religious toleration has nothing whatever to do with the American form of government. There is all the difference in the world between religious freedom and religious toleration. Tolerance implies forbearance. It is the act of a superior toward an inferior. It involves the right to be intolerant at pleasure. It denies a right, and asserts the granting of a favor. If the state tolerates, then she arrogates to herself a superiority to religion; if one particular religion tolerates the rest, it makes the same claim regarding them.

“No man intelligently and morally capable of true religious feelings will accept at the hands of the state, or of any religionists, a tolerance of his religion. Religious toleration can not be tolerated in America. The complete disseverance of church and state, the absolute equality, before the law, of all forms of religion and no religion at all, is the American ideal. Therefore, it is just as fitting for the State of Maryland to erect a monument to the principle of the divine right of kings as to the principle of religious toleration. They both rest upon the same foundation.

“I would suggest in closing that it is hardly time to erect such a monument as is proposed, even at this day. In a State whose statute-books contain such notorious blue-laws as do the statute-books of the State of Maryland, there exists no such thing as religious liberty. Only as late as yesterday the House of Delegates, of which you are an honored member, refused to consider a bill having for its object the revision or the total abolishment of the Maryland blue-laws. Let us not erect a monument to something that does not exist, something we do not possess. Let the legislature do away with all religious laws now on the books, and then it will be time enough to erect a monument to religious liberty, for then we shall have it. Until such a time a monument erected to this great principle would be but a memorial to hypocrisy and falsehood.”