(_h_) “But if the necessity be contracted by ourselves, it is justly punishable. As he who by his wanton thoughts in the day time, doth procure his own nocturnal pollution.” This instance, because it maketh not against anything I have held, and partly also because it is a stinking passage, (for surely if, as he that ascribes eyes to the understanding, allows me to say it hath a nose, it stinketh to the nose of the understanding); this sentence I pass over, observing only the canting terms, _not actually free in itself_, but _virtually free in its causes_. In the rest of his answer to this No. XXV, I find nothing alleged in confutation of anything I have said, saving that his last words are, that “T. H. is mistaken in that also, that the right to kill men doth proceed merely from their being noxious” (No. XIV.). But to that I have in the same No. XIV. already answered. I must not pass over, that a little before he hath these words: “If a child, before he have the use of reason, shall kill a man in his passion, yet because he wanted malice to incite him to it, and reason to restrain him from it, he shall not die for it, in the strict rules of particular justice, unless there be some mixture of public justice in the case”. The Bishop would make but an ill judge of innocent children, for such are they that, for want of age, have not use enough of reason to abstain from killing. For the want of reason proceeding from want of age, does therefore take away the punishment, because it taketh away the crime, and makes them innocent. But he introduceth another justice, which he calleth _public_; whereas he called the other _particular_. And by this public justice, he saith, the child though innocent may be put to death. I hope we shall never have the administration of public justice in such hands as his, or in the hands of such as shall take counsel from him. But the distinction he makes is not by himself understood. There are public causes, and private causes. Private are those, where the parties to the cause are both private men. Public are those, where one of the parties is the commonwealth, or the person that representeth it, and the cause criminal. But there is no distinction of justice into public and private. We may read of men that, having sovereign power, did sometimes put an innocent to death, either upon a vow; as Jepthah did in sacrificing his daughter; or when it hath been thought fit that an innocent person should be put to death to save a great number of people. But to put to death a child, not for reason of state, which he improperly calls public justice, but for killing a man, and at the same time to acknowledge such killing to be no crime, I think was never heard of. NO. XXVI.