[Sidenote: It is known by the civil laws what theft, murder, adultery, and injury are.] 16. Theft, murder, adultery, and all injuries, are forbid by the laws of nature; but what is to be called _theft_, what _murder_, what _adultery_, what _injury_ in a citizen, this is not to be determined by the natural, but by the civil law. For not every taking away of the thing which another possesseth, but only another man’s goods, is theft; but what is our’s, and what another’s, is a question belonging to the civil law. In like manner, not every killing of a man is murder, but only that which the civil law forbids; neither is all encounter with women adultery, but only that which the civil law prohibits. Lastly, all breach of promise is an injury, where the promise itself is lawful; but where there is no right to make any compact, there can be no conveyance of it, and therefore there can no injury follow, as hath been said in the second chapter, Article 17. Now what we may contract for, and what not, depends wholly upon the civil laws. The city of Lacedæmon therefore rightly ordered, that those young men who could so take away certain goods from others as not to be caught, should go unpunished; for it was nothing else but to make a law, that what was so acquired should be their own, and not another’s. Rightly also is that man everywhere slain, whom we kill in war or by the necessity of self-defence. So also that copulation which in one city is matrimony, in another will be judged adultery. Also those contracts which make up marriage in one citizen, do not so in another, although of the same city; because that he who is forbidden by the city, that is, by that one man or council whose the supreme power is, to contract aught, hath no right to make any contract, and therefore having made any, it is not valid, and by consequence no marriage. But his contract which received no prohibition, was therefore of force, and so was matrimony. Neither adds it any force to any unlawful contracts, that they were made by an oath or sacrament;[13] for those add nothing to the strengthening of the contract, as hath been said above, Chap. II. Art. 22. What therefore theft, what murder, what adultery, and in general what injury is, must be known by the civil laws; that is, the commands of him who hath the supreme authority. Footnote 13: