His charter, indeed, seemed to contemplate an established church, for it gave to Baltimore the patronage of all churches and chapels which were to be "consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of our kingdom of England"; nevertheless, no interpretation of the charter was to be made prejudicial to "God's holy and true Christian religion." What was Christian and what was prejudicial was, fortunately for him, left undefined.

No obstacles were placed before a Catholic emigration.
Baltimore had this idea and perhaps a still wider one: a land--Mary's land--where all Christians might foregather, brothers and sisters in one home! Religious tolerance--practical separation of Church and State--that was a broad idea for his age, a generous idea for a Roman Catholic of a time not so far removed from the mediaeval.

True, wherever he went and whatever might be his own thought and feeling, he would still have for overlord a Protestant sovereign, and the words of his charter forbade him to make laws repugnant to the laws of England.

But Maryland was distant, and wise management might do much.

Catholics, Anglicans, Puritans, Dissidents, and Nonconformists of almost any physiognomy, might come and be at home, unpunished for variations in belief.
Only the personal friendship of England's King and the tact and suave sagacity of the Proprietary himself could have procured the signing of this charter, since it was known--as it was to all who cared to busy themselves with the matter--that here was a Catholic meaning to take other Catholics, together with other scarcely less abominable sectaries, out of the reach of Recusancy Acts and religious pains and penalties, to set them free in England-in-America; and, raising there a state on the novel basis of free religion, perhaps to convert the heathen to all manner of errors, and embark on mischiefs far too large for definition.
Taking things as they were in the world, remembering acts of the Catholic Church in the not distant past, the ill-disposed might find some color for the agitation which presently did arise.