it appears
that the Christian Church [and so all Christian states] did for that
purpose appoint the Lord's Day," our weekly Sunday.

This William Penn found in existence and observance by the Swedes and
the Dutch on this territory when he arrived. He therefore advised, and
the first General Assembly of Pennsylvania justly ordained, "that,
according to the good example of the primitive Christians and the ease
of the creation, every first day of the week, called the Lord's Day,
people shall abstain from their common daily labor, that they may the
better dispose themselves to worship God according to their
understandings"--a provision so necessary and important that the
statute laws of our commonwealth have always guarded its observance
with penalties which the State cannot in justice to itself allow to go
unenforced, and which no good citizen should refuse strictly to obey.

And to the same end was it provided and ordained by the first General
Assembly that "if any person shall abuse or deride another for his
different persuasion or practice in religion, such shall be looked
upon as disturbers of the peace, and be punished accordingly." And in
the line of the same wholesome and necessary policy it was also
further provided and ordained that "all such offences against God as
swearing, cursing, lying, profane talking, drunkenness, obscene words,
revels, etc. etc., which excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, and
irreligion, shall be respectively discouraged and severely punished."

Such were the good and righteous provisions made for the restraint of
the licentiousness and brutishness of man in the primeval days of our
commonwealth; and wherein it has since sunk away from these original
organic laws the people have only weakened and degraded themselves,
and hindered that virtuous and happy prosperity which would otherwise
in far larger degree than now be our inheritance.

FORMS OF GOVERNMENT.

V. And yet again, as the fathers of our commonwealth gave us religion
without compulsion, so they also gave us a State without a king.

There is nothing necessarily wrong or necessarily right in this
particular. Monarchy, aristocracy, republicanism, or pure democracy
cannot claim divine right the one over against the other. Either may
be good, or either may be bad, as the situation and the chances may
be. There has been as much bloody wrong and ruin wrought in the name
of liberty as in the establishment of thrones. There have