THE FOUNDING OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL 237 



of the said three persons thereof, shal be punished with death, 

 and confiscation of all his land and goods to the Lord Proprietor 

 and his heires." 



This act proceeds to provide that if any one shall disturb or 

 molest any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ, for or in 

 respect of his religion, or the free exercise thereof, such offender 

 shall pay treble damages to the person so wronged or molested, 

 besides the sum of twenty shillings sterling in money, one-half 

 to the lord proprietary, and the other half to the party so wronged 

 or molested. 



Thus we find this so-called ' act of toleration ' which pun- 

 ished by fine any one who interfered with another's free exercise 

 of his religion, also punished with death any one who preferred 

 to doubt the doctrine of the Trinity, or the Godhead of Christ. 

 It gave religious freedom with one hand, and took it away with 

 the other. Need we wonder that it was called by some * a 

 cursed intolerable toleration '? 



But these statutes were too barbarous to be executed, and no 

 one was put to death in either colony under them ; showing how 

 much men were better than their laws, and more liberal than 

 their creeds. When we shudder at finding in the Virginia code 

 of 161 2, the penalty of death ordained for fifty different offences, 

 we are reminded that far more trifling offences were then pun- 

 ished b}^ death in England, where the i6th and 17th centuries 

 witnessed multitudes of bloody beheadings, hangings, and burn- 

 ings at the stake. We w^ho live in the full blaze of the light 

 that is poured upon the radiant path of human progress may 

 thank God that the ages are gone when men were murdered for 

 their beliefs, their misbeliefs, or their unbeliefs. 



But was there no persecution for religion's sake in colonial 

 daj'^s? History records that in 1663 two Quaker women were 

 flogged, under Virginia laws, thirty-two lashes each, with a nine- 

 corded whip, every stroke of which drew blood. The same year 

 tlie Virginia Assembly enacted that any separatists from the 

 Church of England, assembled for worship, should be fined two 

 hundred pounds of tobacco, and for the third offense should be 

 banished from the colony . The creed and the forms of the Church 

 of England were established as the sole tolerated religion. Peo- 



Proc. Wash. Acad. Sci., January, 1900. 



