CHAP. XXXIX. Of the Sixth Commandment. Q. 1. WHAT are the words of the sixth commandment? Q. 2. What is murder? A. Killing unjustly a reasonable creature. And all that culpably tends to it bringeth an answerable degree of guilt. Q. 3. Why is this command the first that forbiddeth private wrongs? A. Because a man's life is more precious than the accidents of his life; death deprived him of all further time of repentance and earthly mercies, and depriveth all others of the benefit which they might receive by him. They rob God and the king of a subject. Therefore God, who is the Giver of life, is a dreadful Avenger of the sin of murder; Cain was cast out with terror for this sin; for it was the devil's first service, who was a murderer from the beginning. Therefore God made of old the law against eating blood, lest men should be hardened to cruelty, and to teach them his hatred of blood-guiltiness. And it was the murder of the prophets, and of Christ himself, and his apostles, that brought that dreadful destruction on the Jews, when wrath came upon them to the uttermost." Q. 4. If God hate murder, why did he command the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites, men, women, and children? A. Justice done by God, or his authority, on capital malefactors, is not murder. You may as well ask why God will damn so many in hell, which is worse than death. The curse was fallen on Ham's posterity. They were nations of idolaters, and murderers of their own children, offering them to idols, and so drowned in all wickedness that God justly made the Israelites his executioners, to take away their forfeited lands and lives. Q. 5. When is killing murder, or unlawful? y Deut. xix. 10, 13; 1 Kings ii. 31; 2 Kings xxi. 16, and xxii. 4; Prov. vi. 17, and xxviii. 17; Gen. iv. 10, 11; ix. 4-6; xxxvii. 26, and xlii. 22; Hos. iv. 2. Matt. xxiii. 31, and xxvii. 4. 25; Luke xi. 50; Rev. xvi. 6; Acts xxii. 20. Deut. xxvii. 15; xviii. 9, 12, and xxix. 17; 2 Kings xvi. 3; Lev. xviii. 26,27. A. When it is done without authority from God, who is the Lord of life. Q. 6. To whom doth God give such authority to kill men? A. To the supreme rulers of commonwealths, and their magistrates, to whom they communicate it.b Q. 7. May they kill whom they will? A. No, none but those whose crimes are so great as to deserve death by the law of God in nature, and the just laws of the land; even such whose crimes make their death the due interest of the republic, and needful to its good and safety. Q. 8. What if a prince think that the death of an innocent man is accidentally necessary to the safety of himself or the commonwealth, through other men's fault, may he not kill him? c A. No; he is a murderer if he kill the innocent, or any whose fault deserveth not death; should God permit killing on such pretences, no men's lives would be safe. In factions there be other ways of remedy; and such wicked means do but hasten and increase the evil which men would so prevent.d Q. 9. May not parents have power to kill bad children? A. No; I have given you the reason under the fifth commandment. Q. 10. May not a man kill another in the necessary defence of his own life? A. In some cases he may, and in some not; he may, in case it be his equal or inferior, as to public usefulness, and he have no other means, being assaulted by him to save his life from him. But he may not, 1. If by flight, or other just means, he can save his own life. 2. Nor if it be his king, or father, or any public person, whose death would be a greater loss to the commonwealth than his own. Q. 11. How prove you that? A. Because the light of nature tells us, that seeing good and evil are the objects of our willing and nilling; therefore the greatest good should still be preferred, and the greatest evil be most avoided; and that the good or hurt of the commonwealth is far greater than of a single, private person. Q. 12. But doth not nature teach every creature to preserve its life, and rather than die to kill another? b Gen. xxvi. 11; Exod. xix. 12, and xxi. 12, 15—17; Deut. xvii. 6, 7; xxi. 22, and xxiv. 16; Jos. i. 18. John xviii. 14. d1 Sam. xiv. 43–45. • So David to Saul. A. The nature of man is to be rational, and above brutish nature, and to choose by reason, though against sensitive inclin- · ation. Why else must martyrs choose to die rather than to sin? and soldiers choose their own death before their captain's, or their king's, in which God and reason justify them? Q. 13. But by this rule an army should kill their general, rather than to be killed or betrayed to death by him; because all their lives are better than one man's. A. If they be but some part of an army, and the general's life be more useful to the rest, and to their king and country, and the public good, than all theirs, they should rather die, as the Theban legion did. But if the general be a traitor to his king and country, and would destroy all, or part, of the army to the public loss and danger, it is no murder if they kill him when they have no other way to save their lives. Q. 14. How many sorts of murder are there, and which are the worst? A. I. One of the worst is persecution: killing men because they are good, or because they will not break God's laws. And lower degrees of persecution by banishment, imprisonment, mulets, participate of guilt against this command." II. A second sort of heinous murder is by massacres, and unlawful wars, in which multitudes are murdered, and that studiously, and with greatest industry, and countries ruined and undone. The multitude of heinous crimes that are contained in an unlawful war are hardly known, but by sad experience. III. Another sort of heinous murder is, when parents kill their own children, or children their parents. IV. Another is, when princes destroy their own subjects, whom by office they are bound to protect: or subjects their princes, whom they are bound to obey, and defend, and honour. V. Another sort of heinous murder is, when it is committed on pretence of justice, by perjured witnesses, false accusers, or false judges, or magistrates: as Naboth was murdered by . Jezebel and Ahab, and Christ by the Jews, upon false accusations of blasphemy and treason. For in this case the murder is fathered on God, and on justice, which must abhor it, and the best things which should preserve the peace of the innocent are used to the worst ends, even to destroy them. And a man f 1 Chron. xi. 19; 1 John iii. 16; Rev. xii. 11. * Prov. xxix. 10; Rev. vi. 10, 12; xviii. 24, and xix. 2; Matt. xxiii. 35. h1 Kings xxi. 19. hath no defence for himself, as he may have against murderers, or open enemies; and he is destroyed by those that are bound to defend him. And the most devilish, wicked, perjured men, are made the masters of men's lives, and may conquer subjects by perverting law. VI. One of the most heinous crimes is, soul-murder, which is done by all that draw or drive men into sin, or from their duty to God and the care of their salvation, either by seducing, false opinions, opposing necessary truth and duty, or by scorns, or threats. But none here sin so grievously as wicked rulers, and wicked teachers and pastors of the churches. Others kill souls by one and one, but these by hundreds and thousands. And therefore it is the devil's main endeavour, through the world, to get rulers and teachers on his side, and turn the word and sword against him that did ordain them. All the idolatrous world that know not Christ are kept under the power of the devil, principally by wicked rulers and teachers. And so is the infidel and Mahometan world. When the Turks had once conquered the eastern empire, how quickly did those famous churches and large nations forsake Christ, and turn to the grossest of deceivers! Oh, how many millions of souls have been since hereby destroyed! And what wicked, deceitful, and contentious teachers have done to the murdering of souls, alas! the whole christian world is witness. Some by heresy, and some by proud tyranny, and some by malignant opposition to the serious practice of that holy law of God which they preach; and some by ignorance, and some by slothful, treacherous negligence, and some by church divisions, by their snares, or contentiousness. Such as Paul speaks of Phil. i. 15, 16, and ii. 3. And some, in envy, malign and hinder the preaching of the Gospel, by such as they distaste. (1 Thes. ii. 16.) VII. But of all soul-murder, it is one of the greatest which is done by wicked parents on their own children, who breed them up in ignorance, wickedness, and profane neglect, if not hatred and scorn, of serious holiness,' and teach them malignant principles, or hinder them from the necessary means of their salvation that by example teach them to swear and lie, and be drunken or profane. For parents to be the cruel damners of their own children, and this when in false hypocrisy they vowed them in baptism to God, and promised their godly education, is odious cruelty and perfidiousness. 'Deut.fxii. 31; Psalm cvi. 37, 38. VIII. And it is yet a more heinous sin to be a murderer of one's own soul, as every ungodly and impenitent sinner is: for nature teacheth all men to love themselves, and to be unwilling of their own destruction. And no wonder that such are unmerciful to the souls of wives, children, and servants, who will damn themselves, and that for nothing; and that, after all the importunities of God and man to hinder them.k Q. 15. When may a man be accounted a soul-self-murderer, seeing every man hath some sin? A. Every sin, (as every sickness to the body,) is an enemy to life, though it destroy it not: and as wounding a man, yea, or injurious hurting him, or desiring his hurt, is some breach of this command, as Christ tells us, (Matt. v.,) so every sin is as hurtful to the soul. But those are the mortal, murdering sins, which are inconsistent with the predominant habitual love of God and holiness, and are not only from the imperfection of this divine nature and image, but from the absence of it: such as are the sins of the unbelievers and impenitent. Q. 16. But he shall not be hanged for killing another that doth it against his will: and no man is willing to damn himself? A. But a man will himself be a dead man if he kill himself unwillingly and all wicked men do willingly murder their own souls. They be not willing to burn in hell, but they are willingly ungodly, worldly, sensual: and unholiness is the death or misery of the soul, and the departing of the heart or love from God, and choosing the world and fleshly pleasure before his grace and glory, is the true soul-murdering. When God maketh poison destructive to man's nature, and forbids us taking it, and tells a man that it will kill him; if this man will yet take the poison because it is sweet, or will not believe that it is deadly, it is not his being unwilling to die that will save him. When God hath told men that unholiness and a fleshly mind is death, he destroyeth his soul that yet will choose it.m And it is a heinous aggravation that poor sinners have so little for the salvation which they sell. The devil can give them nothing that is to be put into the balance against the least hope or possibility of the life to come; and for a man to sell his own soul and all his hopes of heaven, for a base lust, or a transitory Prov. xiii. 13; xxix. 1; vi. 32, and xxi. 15. 1 Rom. ii. 5, 6, 8; 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10; Eph. v. 5-7. |