Our fathers, in their wisdom, understood this, and fashioned their
state provisions and laws accordingly.
The thing specified as the supreme concern of the public authorities
in the original settlement of this territory by the Swedes was, to
"consider and see to it that a true and due worship, becoming honor,
laud, and praise be paid to the most high God in all things," and that
"all persons, but especially the young, shall be duly instructed in
the articles of their Christian faith."
But if public worship and religious instruction are to be fostered and
preserved by the state, there must be set times for it, the people
released at those times from hindering occupations and engagements,
and whatever may interfere therewith restrained and put under bonds
against interruption. In other words, the Lord's proper worship
demands and requires a protected Lord's Day. Such appointed and sacred
times for these holy purposes have been from the foundation of the
world. Under all dispensations one day in every seven was a day unto
the Lord, protected and preserved for such sacred uses, on which
secular occupations should cease, and nothing allowed which would
interfere with the public worship of Almighty God and the handling of
his Word. And "because it was requisite to appoint a certain day, that
the people might know when they ought to come together, 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.