Of Crimes, Excuses, and Extenuations
A sin, is not only a transgression of a law, but also any contempt of the legislator. For such contempt is a breach of all his laws at once. And therefore may consist, not only in the “commission” of a fact, or in speaking of words by the laws forbidden, or in the “omission” of what the law commandeth, but also in the “intention,” or purpose to transgress. For the purpose to break the law is some degree of contempt of him to whom it belongeth to see it executed. To be delighted in the imagination only of being possessed of another man’s goods, servants, or wife, without any intention to take them from him by force or fraud, is no breach of the law, that saith, “Thou shalt not covet”: nor is the pleasure a man may have in imagining or dreaming of the death of him, from whose life he expecteth nothing but damage and displeasure, a sin; but the resolving to put some act in execution that tendeth thereto. For to be pleased in the fiction of that which would please a man if it were real, is a passion so adherent to the nature both of man and every other living creature, as to make it a sin, were to make sin of being a man. The consideration of this has made me think them too severe, both to themselves and others, that maintain that the first motions of the mind, though checked with the fear of God, be sins. But I confess it is safer to err on that hand than on the other.
A “crime,” is a sin, consisting in the committing, by deed or word, of that which the law forbiddeth, or the omission of what it hath commanded. So that every crime is a sin; but not every sin a crime. To intend to steal, or kill, is a sin, though it never appear in word or fact: for God that seeth the thoughts of man, can lay it to his charge: but till it appear by something done, or said, by which the intention may be argued by a human judge, it hath not the name of crime: which distinction the