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.