ABSTRACT
At one time it was fashionable to weigh the alleged "motives" that contributed to the colonization of America. Accordingly, arguments erupted about the relative significance of commercial and religious impulses, partisans of each position supporting their cases with polemic as well as evidence. The leaders of Massachusetts Bay lavishly expounded their theory of society and their understanding of the relationship between church and state. Against the rest of New England the settlements around Narragansett Bay provide vivid contrast on the issue of church and state. To its orthodox contemporaries this minute and quarrelsome colony was a cesspool. As the colonial establishment sought to clarify the relationships between church and state, they faced occasional protest or opposition from religious dissenters. The Maryland Colony represents a peculiar chapter in the records of church-state relationships in colonial America. The seventeenth-century language of establishment is often overlooked by those who are concerned to locate instances of official toleration of religious liberty in colonial affairs.
