Page:William Penn the Friend of Catholics.pdf/14

8 clearly, that this lesson taught our Catholic children that Penn's followers bitterly opposed the religious toleration of Catholics, is founded on error, let me cite the testimony afforded by a letter in the London Magazine and Monthly Chronologer, dated July 7, 1737, and which may be examined at the Ridgway Library. Charges are made against the Quakers: a correspondent endorses them and adds, "A small specimen of a notable event which the people of that profession have taken towards the propagation of Popery in Pennsylvania. Let the Quakers deny it if they can. In the town of Philadelphia is a public Popish chapel where that religion has free and open exercise, and all the superstitious rites of that Church are as avowedly performed as those of the Church of England are in the Royal chapel of St. James'; and this chapel is not only open upon fasts and festivals, but is so all day and every day of the year, and exceedingly frequented at all hours either for public or private devotions, though it is fullest at those times when the meeting-house of the men of St. Omers is thinnest, and vice-versa." And one hundred and fifty years afterwards on the same spot is a chapel, not only open on fasts and festivals, but is so all day and every day in the week, and frequented at all hours either for public or private devotions—dear St. Joseph's. "The men of St. Omers," you will remember, is intended as a stigma on the Quakers as being "Papists," from the Catholic College of St. Omers, in France,

The correspondent continues, "that these are truths you may be satisfied of by inquiry of any trader or gentleman who has been there within a few years."

And we know it was the truth, and it remained the solitary instance, until the Revolution, of a Catholic chapel in all the British Provinces, so much so that Rev. McSparran, writing from Narragansett, R. I., in 1752, to a friend in England, mentions the fact that in Philadelphia there was then a Popish chapel, the only one in the British Provinces. At this very time, though the Provincial laws permitted only "Protestants to hold lands for the erection of churches, schools or hospitals," as Dr. Stillee states in his very valuable "Test Laws in Provincial Pennsylvania," yet the title of the ground on which St. Joseph's Chapel stood, was then in the name of Rev. Robert Molyneux, and so recorded, as the recently discovered brief of title now in the MSS. department of the American Catholic Historical Society, shows.

During all this time the Quakers were in power, and during this time Catholics freely, publicly and unmolested, had all the public exercises of their religion as to-day, and nowhere is there a trace of a cause for instilling in the minds of our children that Penn's followers "bitterly opposed" them.

Everywhere throughout the Province the friendship existing between Quakers and "Papists" was known. Even the street ballads prove this, as witness the following lines from "A Poor Man's Advice to His Neighbor. A Ballad. New York, 1774:

And seventy years before that from Maryland came the report to the London Society for Propagating the Gospel. "Popish priests and Quakers equally obstruct a good progress." [First Report 1703.]

Not only had Penn and his people in England to suffer as "Papists," but in this country even, down to the heat of the Revolutionary War, Catholic titles, opprobiously applied, were used to stigmatize the Quakers. The bigot, John Adams, who on October 9th, 1774, accompanied Washington to Vespers, could at once write his wife about "the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not one word of which they understood, their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias—their holy water, their crossing themselves perpetually—everything to charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant"—could also on September 8th, 1770, write: "We have been obliged to humble the pride of some Jesuits who call themselves Quakers."