Nevertheless we are not to understand, that by such liberty, the sovereign power of life and death is either abolished or limited. For it has been already shown, that nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called injustice or injury; because every subject is author of every act the sovereign doth; so that he never wanteth right to anything, otherwise than as he himself is the subject of God, and bound thereby to observe the laws of Nature. And therefore it may, and doth often happen in commonwealths, that a subject may be put to death by the command of the sovereign power; and yet neither do the other wrong: as when Jephtha caused his daughter to be sacrificed; in which, and the like cases, he that so dieth, had liberty to do the action, for which he is nevertheless without injury put to death. And the same holdeth also in a sovereign prince that putteth to death an innocent subject. For though the action be against the law of Nature, as being contrary to equity, as was the killing of Uriah, by David; yet it was not an injury to Uriah, but to God.