looks not upon it as an act of murder; because there wanted a power to deliberate, and consequently true liberty. Manslaughter may be as voluntary as murder, and commonly more voluntary; because being done in hot blood there is the less reluctation. Yet the law considers, that the former is done out of some sudden passion without serious deliberation, and the other out of prepensed malice and desire of revenge; and therefore condemns murder, as more wilful and more punishable than manslaughter.” (_b_) “He saith, ‘that no law can possibly be unjust;’ and I say, that this is to deny the conclusion, which deserves no reply. But to give him satisfaction, I will follow him in this also, if he intended no more but that unjust laws are not genuine laws, nor bind to active obedience, because they are not the ordinations of right reason, not instituted for the common good, nor prescribe that which ought to be done; he said truly, but nothing at all to his purpose. But if he intend, as he doth, that there are no laws _de facto_, which are the ordinances of reason erring, instituted for the common hurt, and prescribing that which ought not to be done, he is much mistaken. Pharaoh’s law, to drown the male children of the Israelites (Exod. i. 22); Nebuchadnezzar’s law, that whosoever did not fall down and worship the golden image which he had set up, should be cast into the fiery furnace (Dan. iii. 4-6); Darius’s law, that whosoever should ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days, save of the king, should be cast into the den of lions (Dan. vi. 7); Ahasuerus’s law, to destroy the Jewish nation, root and branch (Esther iii. 13); the Pharisees’ law, that whosoever confesseth Christ, should be excommunicated (John ix. 22); were all unjust laws. (_c_) “The ground of this error is as great an error itself (such an art he hath learned of repacking paradoxes); which is this, ‘that every man makes by his consent the law which he is bound to keep.’ If this were true, it would preserve them, if not from being unjust, yet from being injurious. But it is not true. The positive law of God, contained in the Old and New Testament; the law of nature, written in our hearts by the finger of God; the laws of conquerors, who come in by the power of the sword; the laws of our ancestors, which were made before we were born; do all oblige us to the observation of them; yet to none of all these did we give our actual consent. Over and above all these exceptions, he builds upon a wrong foundation, that all magistrates at first were elective. The first governors were fathers of families; and when those petty princes could not afford competent protection and security to their subjects, many of them did resign their several and respective interests into the hands of one joint father of the country.