ROME AND RELIGIOUS TOLERATION.
By Editor
Last week we briefly commented on one of Mr. Dougherty's assertions against American Protestants, made in his fiery address at the recent Catholic Congress at Baltimore, and repeated since at the Academy of Music in this city. His speech was crowded with statements that are open to question, but we have space here to notice only one of them:— "We assert that we are pre-eminently Americans; that there would be no America, that the continent would be to-day unknown, had it not been for the Roman Catholics, and the Roman Catholic Church; that that liberty which is the essence of all liberty,—freedom to worship God,—was first established in America by Roman Catholics, and Roman Catholics alone." We shall not call in question the facts that Christopher Columbus discovered San Salvador and other West India islands in 1492, and that he was a Catholic; but we are more than dubious in regard to the assertion that "freedom to worship God was first established in America by Roman Catholics and by Roman Catholics alone." In 1627 Gustavus Adolphus, the Lutheran king of Sweden, authorized an expedition to settle in America, for the express purpose of establishing a colony in which freedom to worship God might be enjoyed by all, while he himself left Sweden to lead his army in Germany to fight for that same religious freedom against the forces of Roman Catholic Austria and Spain, who carried on the thirty years' war for the purpose of suppressing religious freedom and toleration in Protestant Germany. The expedition authorized by Gustavus Adolphus was sent, after his death, by Oxenstiern, his prime minister, and established the colony of New Sweden, on both sides of the Delaware, from Cape Henlopen to the Falls of Trenton, having purchased the lands from the Indians. This was the first establishment of religious freedom on the American continent, and it was established by Lutherans from Sweden, long before the Catholic colony of Lord Calvert adopted an act of religious787toleration for the inhabitants of Maryland, which occurred in 1649. Many persons, not acquainted with the historic facts, award the credit of a peace policy with the Indians, and of religious toleration in Pennsylvania, to William Penn; but the truth is that the Swedes had inaugurated and established that humane and Christian policy nearly fifty years before Penn and his colony landed at Philadelphia, which was in 1682. We do not wish to withhold from the Catholic Lord Baltimore any of the credit due him for the policy of religious toleration established in the colony of Maryland. We give him due honor for that wise and Christian policy. But we do object to Mr. Dougherty's citing him as the first to establish freedom of worship in America, because it is not in accordance with historic fact. For a Roman Catholic to boast that a Roman Catholic colony had established religious freedom and toleration in America, is such an anomaly in Roman Catholic history that it may well attract unusual attention. There is not now, and there has not been in past history, a Catholic country on earth in which equal religious freedom has been enjoyed by Protestants, and in which the Catholic Church has had the power to suppress it. Spain and Austria are Catholic countries, but Protestants in those countries do not enjoy freedom of worship. And if the temporal power were now restored to the pope, as he so persistently demands, freedom of worship in Rome would cease, and the intolerant and persecuting régime of former years would doubtless be again established. If the entire North American continent had been first colonized by Catholics, like Mexico and South America, no intelligent person would believe that religious freedom and toleration would have been extended to Protestants, any more than it was in the countries of South America settled by them, or than it is now in any country in which the Roman Catholic Church has the power to prevent it. The Roman Catholics are indebted to Protestants for the equal religious freedom which they and all other citizens enjoy in our country, and except the colony of Maryland, we believe there is no instance in history in which the Roman Church in power ever granted equal rights of worship to Protestants without being forced to do so.—Lutheran Observer.