Crime is not punished on earth--as divines teach us it will be punished in heaven--on a principle of retributive justice, and according to our moral deserts.
The one relates to the natural and little cultivated feelings of mankind, which demand retaliation for injuries committed--a vindictive or retributive justice.
In this, as in all the gathering calamities of his country, he sees a retributive meaning.
In the history of nations as in the lives of individuals there are times when repentance, even if possible, would be too late to avert the evils which long periods of misdoing have called from the abyss to do their penal and retributive work.
The cry to heaven for an immediate act of retributive justice is not the last thing recorded of the prophet's experience on this occasion.
A pure despotism in the hands of one man has seldom been seen, except in the instances of those renowned military chiefs, whom a retributive Providence has at intervals employed as the scourge of guilty nations.
All history, and the daily march of events, demonstrate the perpetual retributive interference of an overruling providence.
No man has, or ever had, the right to wield the awful attribute of retributive justice; that is, to inflict so much pain for so much guilt or moral turpitude.
The exercise of retributivejustice belongs exclusively to the infallible Ruler of the world, and not to frail, erring man, who himself so greatly stands in need of mercy.
My hoe becomes an instrument of retributive justice.
It is, however, to be expected, that retributive justice would visit the innocent as well as the guilty of an offending family.
The wrath of man has worked out the retributive justice of God.
The same sort of retributive justice was recognized by the Institutes of Manu, which punished a thief by the amputation or mutilation of his fingers.
Here we have a strict application of the lex talionis, the primitive retributive principle of taking an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Of course this kind of punishment is chiefly preventive, nevertheless it is provoked by acts already perpetrated and is not wholly free from the element of retributive justice.
She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence.
The shiver of filial fear at his retributive justice induced me to make an effort to support myself in a new field.
Treaty after treaty had been made with the Indians, and were equally worthless, whenever they had a fair show for stealing cattle with the chance of escaping retributive justice.
Can you not, my friends, understand the signs of the times; do you not see the sword of retributive justice hanging over the South, or are you still slumbering at your posts?
Alarmed by the uproar, men poured from below, not knowing whether they were attacked by a retributive cruiser.
Even Juan Cervillo realised that there were great difficulties and perils in his path that were as formidable as the retributive warships he had hitherto escaped.
There are those who see in the fate of Poland that retributive justice which Heaven accords to nations as well as to individuals.
Memories of Tory confiscations and penalties were sufficiently fresh to give credence to a rumour that the President-elect contemplated such retributive measures toward his political opponents.
Instantly the public thought turned to a protective tariff, not only to save the manufactures, but as a retributive measure against England.
Thus slavery established and maintained itself, through individual and national crime and blood, until the day when God's retributive justice should come.
Such were the awful dispensations of retributive justice.
Two of them appeared so pre-eminent in dishonesty, that the most determined advocates of the old system could not ward off retributive justice.
Who, if privileged, would be willing to fix a limit to God's retributive justice upon the heads of the infamous, and in many instances cowardly originators of this Rebellion!
The blaze of retributive vengeance may awe the propensities to crime into inaction; but it cannot uproot them.
There were those who saw in his fate the retributive punishment of God for his cousin's death!
It is the law which he himself has taught us," said another, "the law of retributive justice.
He favors a conditional immortality, belonging only to those who are joined to Christ by faith; but he makes a retributivepunishment and pain fall upon the godless, before their annihilation.
The actual facts of human life and the tendencies of modern science show that this principle of retributive justice is inwrought into the elements and forces of the physical and moral universe.
