But the Bishop putteth his greatest confidence in this, that whether the things be impossible in themselves, or made impossible by some unseen accident, yet there is no reason that men should be _punished for not doing them_. It seems he taketh punishment for a kind of revenge, and can never therefore agree with me, that take it for nothing else but for a correction, or for an example, which hath for end the _framing_ and _necessitating of the will_ to virtue; and that he is no good man, that upon any provocation useth his power, though a power lawfully obtained, to afflict another man without this end, to reform the will of him or others. Nor can I comprehend, as having only humane ideas, that that punishment which neither intendeth the correction of the offender, nor the correction of others by example, doth proceed from God. (_b_) “He saith that no law can possibly be unjust,” &c. Against this he replies that the law of Pharaoh, to drown the male children of the Israelites; and of Nebuchadnezzar, to worship the golden image; and of Darius, against praying to any but him in thirty days; and of Ahasuerus, to destroy the Jews; and of the Pharisees, to excommunicate the confessors of Christ; were all unjust laws. The laws of these kings, as they were laws, have relation only to the men that were their subjects; and the _making_ of them, which was the action of every one of those kings, who were subjects to another king, namely, to God Almighty, had relation to the law of God. In the first relation, there could be no injustice in them; because all laws made by him to whom the people had given the legislative power, are the acts of every one of that people; and no man can do injustice to himself. But in relation to God, if God have by a law forbidden it, the making of such laws is injustice. Which law of God was to those heathen princes no other but _salus populi_, that is to say, the properest use of their natural reason for the preservation of their subjects. If therefore those laws were ordained out of wantonness, or cruelty, or envy, or for the pleasing of a favourite, or out of any other sinister end, as it seems they were, the making of those laws was unjust. But if in right reason they were necessary for the preservation of those people of whom they had undertaken the charge, then was it not unjust. And for the Pharisees, who had the same written law of God that we have, their excommunication of the Christians, proceeding, as it did, from envy, was an act of malicious injustice. If it had proceeded from misinterpretation of their own Scriptures, it had been a sin of ignorance. Nevertheless, as it was a law to their subjects (in case they had the legislative power, which I doubt of), the law was not unjust. But the making of it was an unjust action, of which they were to give account to none but God. I fear the Bishop will think this discourse too subtile; but the judgment is the reader’s.