"Retributory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of sport there is always a penalty for extreme eagerness. There is a retributive justice for those that attempt to grasp opportunities. Harold was afraid that Bill might raise and shoot, thus rubbing him of his triumph, and he pressed back against the trigger just a fifth of a second too soon. The target looked too big to ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... help myself," she said, urged by the fear lest her anticipated misfortunes might be held retributive, to take comprehensive review of her past conduct. "There's no woman strives more for her children; and I'm sure at scouring-time this Lady-day as I've had all the bedhangings taken down I did as much as the two gells ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... another substituted in its stead. Not less strange, however, did thousands of good Englishmen deem it, to behold the proud "British Lion" quail before his foe of "the wilderness," and the "Magna Charta" rent in twain. We must look upon it then as an exercise of God's retributive justice for our Sins as a people, or, that He designs that He shall ultimately be the more glorified by the separation. In the former case of course I take it that the North will receive the awful visitation, for although offences must needs come, yet, woe be unto ...
— Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Father and His Youngest Sister, - 1857-78 • Ulysses S. Grant
... comparison with those of Settle. But the meretricious ornaments which he himself had introduced were within the reach of the meanest capacity; and, having been among the first to debauch the taste of the public, it was retributive justice that he should experience their inconstancy. Indeed Dryden seems himself to admit, that the principal difference between his heroic plays and "The Empress of Morocco," was, that the former were good sense, that looked like nonsense, and the latter nonsense, which yet looked ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Scriptures. The holy prophets of Judea had predicted that after seventy years the captives should return, and that Babylon itself should afterward be destroyed. The first prediction was fulfilled by the victory of Cyrus. It devolved on Darius to execute the second of these solemn and retributive decrees of heaven. ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... attachment to a fellow so uninteresting to themselves as her husband, but has married him on other grounds. Who, under such circumstances, pities the husband? Even his female friends are apt to think his position retributive: he should have chosen some one else. But perhaps Deronda may be excused that he did not prepare any pity for Grandcourt, who had never struck acquaintances as likely to come out of his experiences with more suffering than he inflicted; whereas, for Gwendolen, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was rent with schism, the candle that Hus and Jerome had lighted a century before, still burning clearly among less sober heresies, which drew down on it, as upon themselves, spasmodic outbursts of retributive violence. Uneasy sat the crown on Ladislas' head; and when Death, coming as a friend, took it from him in 1516, it was only to thrust this sad office upon a ten-year-old boy, who after ten more years of childish government ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... that we can help one another remains in Buddhism (as in any retributive scheme) only by a serious inconsistency; and since this fact is the sanction of whatever moral efficacy can be attributed to Buddhism, in sobering, teaching, and saving mankind, anything inconsistent with it is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... for Phenomena Will Change of Atoms Our Limitations Final Race Experience Religious Performances Of Teachers Wise Use of Money Genius Thoughts Are Things Unfoldment Inventions Divine Healing Surplus Analysis of the Lord's Prayer Absurd Beliefs The Resurrection The Creator Retributive Justice ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... in the chronicles of the times and establishes beyond cavil exactly what Las Casas did, and under what circumstances and for what purposes he made the recommendation which he never afterwards ceased to deplore. Retributive justice has followed these attempts of several lesser contemporaries of Robertson to asperse the character of one of the purest, noblest, and most humane of men, and while discredit has overtaken the inventors ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... pang; as if the wretch, Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, Passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed; As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days Are coming on us, O my countrymen! And what if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... Toinetta, over whom Piero had triumphed, soon became the husband of another donzel, handsomer than Toinetta had been—poor, foolish Toinetta!—and the retributive tragedy of her little life had warmed the sullen Gabriele into a magnanimity that rendered him at least a safe, if a moody and unpleasant, member of the traghetto in which Piero had since become a rising star. A man with a ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... memories attached to a Potter's Field,—save, possibly, in this case, a certain scandalous old story of robbing it of its dead for the benefit of the medical students of the town. That was a disgraceful business if you like! But public feeling was so bitter and retributive that the practice was speedily discontinued. So, again, there is nothing to make us recoil, here among the green shadows of the square, from the recollection of the Potter's Field. But there is always something fundamentally shocking ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... boys came downstairs, there was as comfortless a scene displayed before them as the most retributive justice could have wished to visit on the rebellious. The morning raw and cold, the floor saturated with water, and covered with cases of exploded fireworks; the school-room in horrible confusion, scarcely a pane of glass unshattered—the walls blackened, the books torn—and then the masters ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... headmaster say reproachfully to an industrious boy who had committed a fault, 'I might have expected this in Thomas Idle, but it is inexcusable, sir, in you, who know better.' Never more, after winning that fatal prize, did he escape the retributive imposition, or the avenging birch. From that time, the masters made him work, and the boys would not let him play. From that time his social position steadily declined, and his life at school became a perpetual burden ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... punishes by means of medicinal penalties, so to speak, that is, in order to correct the criminal or at least to provide an example for others, might exist in the opinion of those who do away with the freedom that is exempt from necessity. True [423] retributive justice, on the other hand, going beyond the medicinal, assumes something more, namely, intelligence and freedom in him who sins, because the harmony of things demands a satisfaction, or evil in the form of suffering, to make the mind feel its error after the voluntary active ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... says,' continued the Good Stockbroker, 'that the tendency to monogamy is innate, and all the other forms of marriage have been temporary deviations, each bringing their own retributive evils. After all, monogamous marriage was instituted for the protection of women, and has been held sacred in the great and noble ages of the world. Quite apart from the moral point of view, however, ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... unjust conduct of the English towards our country and sovereign; and thinking as you do yourself, I know what you must suffer when you are obliged to submit to national insults, unretaliated and unrevenged. But let us not conceive ourselves the agents of that retributive vengeance which Heaven has, in a peculiar degree, declared to be its own attribute. Let us, while we see and feel the injuries inflicted on our own country, not forget that our own raids, ambuscades, and surprisals, have been at least equally fatal to the English as their attacks and forays ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... ignorant that her mother had given it to Bertie, she deemed it safe in that sacred repository. Now, like the face of Medusa it glared at her, and that which her father's lips had sanctified, became the polluted medium of a retributive curse upon his devoted child. So the Diabolus ex machina, the evil genius of each human life decrees that the most cruel cureless pangs are inflicted by the instruments we ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with his fellow-men, but never, until the incident of Devil's Hole, had he deliberately planned murder. Thus tonight Maison's conscience had more ghastly evidence to confront him with, and conscience is a pitiless retributive agent. ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... schoolfellows and masters, our parents, servants, friends—and carry them through experiences and situations derived from our impressions of real life. Perhaps we rather led them a dance; and I daresay those we didn't like came in for a good deal of retributive justice. It was a little universe, of which we were the arch-arbiters, our will the ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... has a retributive power. At the moment of commission it implants a sting in the conscience which, in the impenitent man, lights a flame, which, without the application of the Precious Blood, is never extinguished. In Holiness the sting is extracted, and ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... a prominent feature in her early history, and which furnished, it is believed, the first example of the exercise of this extraordinary power ever known in the United Colonies during the revolutionary struggle. And whatever may have been the effects of this retributive policy in other states, its results here were salutary and important. It put an immediate stop to any further espousing of British interests, especially among men of property, while, within the astonishingly short space ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... Doria, and felt culpable that she had not before, and could not then, tell her brother that he had set up an Idol in his house—an Idol of flesh! more retributive and abominable than wood or brass or gold. But she had bowed to the Idol too long—she had too entirely bound herself to gain her project by subserviency. She had, and she dimly perceived it, committed a greater fault in tactics, in teaching her daughter to bow to the Idol also. Love ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ordinarily incapable of observation, and just now lost in the tumult of his wrath, can see a thing when it is painted red for him. Interpreting the blush as the involuntary confession of black deceit confronted with its victim, he points to it with a loud crow of retributive triumph, and then, seizing her by the wrist, pulls her past him into the room as he claps the door to, and plants himself with his ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... have been by the whites, the colored people certainly claim from us some degree of retributive justice; we would, therefore, at this time particularly and earnestly recommend to the renewed attention of all the Abolition, Manumission and Anti-Slavery Societies in this country, the all-important subject of giving the colored children literary ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... cruelties amongst the conquered people of the Soudan; but to Frank as he sat there the idea of their being slain before his eyes in cold blood half maddened him, filling him with an intense desire to be one of a retributive army whose task it would be to sweep their conquerors from the land and back into the wild districts from which they had flocked in response to the hoisting of the Mahdi's standard of war with its promise of ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... evidence for the prosecution in the approaching trial of the Viscount Vincent and Faustina Dugald; or the fatal effect it must have upon the accused; yet no one spoke of it then and there. The day of stern retributive justice was not the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... whom the motion for disbarment would probably come! For this last curious reason no lawyer could, consistently with his own best interests, inaugurate a movement likely to involve the whole referee system in its retributive effects. A lawyer so doing might, when arguing future cases in court, find a certain apparent disposition of the Bench to show him less courtesy than on former occasions—to snub him, in fact, and thereby permanently prejudice his professional future ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... laughing,—a feeling which was modified by the desire to assure his employer that he understood this sort of thing perfectly, had run the same risks himself, and thought no less of a man, providing he was a gentleman, because of an unlucky retributive knock on the head. But he feared laughter would overclimb speech; and, indeed, with all expression of sympathy stifled, he did not succeed so completely in hiding the conflicting emotion but that Joseph did once turn his ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... As Richard III., we should look to find him most effective in schemeful soliloquy and the phases of assumed virtue and affection, while perhaps less eminent than his father or Edmund Kean in that headlong, strident unrest, which hurried on their representations to the fury or the retributive end. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... What was this trust, this unknown inheritance from Gentleman Geoff? There had been an ominous note in her voice when she spoke of it, and he remembered what the gambler had told him of her eye-for-an-eye creed of retributive justice. In her splendid, reckless courage could she have pitted herself against El Negrito, the bandit ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... This is intellect. The weeds, on the other hand, have hateful moral qualities. To cut down a weed is, therefore, to do a moral action. I feel as if I were destroying a sin. My hoe becomes an instrument of retributive justice. I am an apostle of nature. This view of the matter lends a dignity to the art of hoeing which nothing else does, and lifts it into the region of ethics. Hoeing becomes, not a pastime, but a duty. And you get to regard it so, as ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... effigies in marble, exquisite sculptures when fresh from the artist's hand, to-day torsos so hideously hacked and hewn as hardly to look human! We cannot, however, forget that the history of races, as of nations and individuals, is retributive. When the 'Roi-Soleil,' that incarnation of the Bourbon spirit, was so inflated with his own personality as to forbid the erection of any statue throughout France but his own, he paved the way for the revolutionary ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... killed his uncle out of hand, whether at prayers or anywhere else, and would then have married Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162] And to that edifying assumption, Mr. Feis adds the fantasy that Shakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne as a deterrent from the retributive slaughter of guilty uncles ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... protruding from the chimney, when his benighted intellect prompted him, at the imminent hazard of strangulation, to pay a visit to the object of his affections via that unusually circuitous route. Look at the fatal brawl between Sir Mulberry Hawk and his hopeful pupil; and rejoice at the final retributive justice which overtakes Mrs. Squeers, when she falls into the hands of her late victims, and is drenched in her turn with the loathsome brew she had so long ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... violations are regarded with particular horror, because they are frequently held to be not only infringements of established ways of the tribe, but as offenses against the gods, offenses which involve the whole tribe in the retributive punishments of the gods. Violation of the customary may, indeed, apart from arousing intellectual disapproval, provoke a genuine revulsion of feeling on the part of a group which has acquired certain fixed habits. We still feel emotionally shocked by the infringement of a custom that we ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... of my heresies in an orthodox theological sense, but I certainly cling to the great idea of Eternal Hope; and, after any amount of retributive punishment for purifying the "lost" soul, I look for ultimate salvation to all God's creatures. This short and partial trial-scene of ours is not enough to make an end with: we begin here and progress for ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and strength. And he, too, loved me passionately, devotedly. Strong indeed must have been the love that triumphed over principle, honor, and truth, that broke the most sacred of human ties, and dared the vengeance of retributive Heaven. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the commoner, modern art-criticism has probably wasted much honest but shamefaced capacity for appreciating the qualities common, because indispensable, to, all good art. It is therefore not without a certain retributive malignity that I end these examples of the storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion, and of the consequent bias to artistic appreciation, with that of the Nemesis dogging the steps of the connoisseur. We have all heard ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... miracles. Out of Germany's strength, in whose purpose so many people refused to believe, came Poland's opportunity, in which nobody could have been expected to believe. Out of Russia's collapse emerged that forbidden thing, the Polish independence, not as a vengeful figure, the retributive shadow of the crime, but as something much more solid and more difficult to get rid of—a political necessity and a moral solution. Directly it appeared its practical usefulness became undeniable, and also the fact that, for better or worse, it was impossible ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... realize what is going on over yonder, by the graveyard, in that crowd of men and women; for there are gathered together the Chippewas, old and young men, women and children, who have come out to witness or take part in this act of retributive justice. There are blue coats, too, and various badges of our U. S. uniform; for it is necessary to hold some restraint over these red men, or there may be wholesale murder; and borne on the shoulders of his young men, we see the form of the ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... of being, and that many people are now entering into a stage which will terminate the unconscious reincarnation, and which enables them to incarnate consciously in the future without loss of memory. It teaches that instead of a retributive Karma, there is a Law of Spiritual Cause and Effect, operating largely along the lines of Desire and what has been called the "Law of Attraction," by which "like attracts like," in persons, environments, conditions, etc. As we have ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... Teddy Mahr was undoubtedly one of encouragement. Honesty compelled Gard to own that he could not find in the boy the echo of the objectionable sire. Perhaps the long dead mother, who was never a lawful wife, had, by some retributive turn of justice, endowed him wholly with her own qualities. Gard could almost find it in his breast to like the big, large-hearted, gentle boy, but for a final irony of fate—the son's blind adoration of his father, and that father's obvious but helpless dislike of the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... processes of retributive justice. How tardy the infinitesimal grind! Would that the ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... their principles, and are carried out by them into the duties and avocations of future life. It would be startling to many to know with what intelligence and accuracy motives are penetrated, inconsistencies remarked, and treasured up with retributive or imitative projects, as may best suit the purpose of the moment. Nothing but a more extensive knowledge of children than is usually possessed on entering life, can awaken parents to the perception of this truth; and awakened perception may, perhaps, be only awakened misery. How important ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... and Ribault and destroyed them, with very few exceptions, in September 1565. On the other hand, every one has heard how the Spaniards, almost all except the absent leader, expiated their murderous cruelty in April 1568, under the retributive justice of De Gourgues. The Spanish settlers of Florida were thus as completely exterminated by the French as the French three years before had been exterminated by ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... her own East he would have paid the same penalty. The method would have been more refined, to be sure; there would have been a long legal squabble, with its tedious delays, but in the end Corrigan would have paid. There was a retributive justice for all those who infracted the rules of the game. ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... meeting a policeman on a lonely wharf and whistling a few operatic airs with him, and being caught by him crawling out of a freight-car. So Dick waited, as even a New Orleans policeman must move on some time—perhaps it is a retributive law of nature—and before long "Big Fritz" majestically disappeared between the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... that Aeschylus has viewed the subject in its most terrible aspect, and drawn it within that domain of the gloomy divinities, whose recesses he so loves to haunt. The grave of Agamemnon is the murky gloom from which retributive vengeance issues; his discontented shade, the soul of the whole poem. The obvious external defect, that the action lingers too long at the same point, without any sensible progress, appears, on reflection, a true internal perfection: it is the stillness of expectation ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... house, and cut his children's throats; or else that the wife's last outbreak had been the incidental cause of the discovery of his own previous crimes. In the last case we had an instance of that 'retributive vengeance' which, though it cannot be 'reduced to a very logical form, speaks in tones of thunder to the imaginations ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... not retributive justice but moral perfectness, which to a good man will be joy, and to a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... but material symbols for the six stages of the ascent of the mind to the pure God-idea. The chief city, the metropolis, is the Divine Logos, next come the two powers already considered, and then three secondary powers, the retributive, the law-giving, and the prohibitive. "Very beautiful and well-fenced cities they are, worthy refuges of souls that merit salvation." Each of these cities is an aspect of the religious mind; when it settles in the first it obeys the law from fear of punishment and thinks ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... the year of his magistracy, but his remaining life. For as our diseases decline, as it is supposed, with our declining bodily strength, so the quarreling humor of the Greeks abated much with their failing political greatness. But fortune or some divine retributive power threw him down the in close of his life, like a successful runner who stumbles at the goal. It is reported, that being in company where one was praised for a great commander, he replied, there was no great account to be made of a man, who had suffered ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... steamer wreck, only to make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. Laura is a sort of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim. As for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a present-day audience would not have pelted her from the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... action, giving law and shape to everything that is said and done. This is manifestly true in what occurs before his death; and it is true in a still deeper sense afterwards, since his genius then becomes the Nemesis or retributive Providence. ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... pnnciple of Retribution; "retributive issues in this life, and the existence in all minds of an impersonal justice which demands that, in the final issue, every being shall receive his just deserts, suppose a being of absolute justice who shall render to every man according to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... His see was usually mispronounced as Nankipoo. He was following us up to consecrate the graves of our battlefields. Great delight was given by the thought that Westlake's still unexploded bombs would receive consecration also for any retributive work that awaited them. And we brooded over the suggestion that the good Bishop might find, even in Mesopotamia, Elijah's way ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... bankrupt, wretched landlords. It is to the law, or rather to the government and legislature which uphold it, and refuse to mitigate its ferocity, that the crime rightly attaches; and they will be held responsible for it by history, by posterity—ay, and perhaps before long, by the retributive justice of God, and the vengeance of a people infuriated by barbarous oppression, and brought at last to bay by their destroyers." It is difficult to read such statements and wonder that agrarian outrage prevailed extensively in Ireland, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... estimated at a thousand millions of dollars. The railroads had created the Trust, the ogre of corporate greed, of which Ryder was the incarnation, and in time the Trust became master of the railroads, which after all seemed but retributive justice. ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... board. The nearest approach to a religious feeling which I heard of, was shown by York Minster, who, when Mr. Bynoe shot some very young ducklings as specimens, declared in the most solemn manner, "Oh, Mr. Bynoe, much rain, snow, blow much." This was evidently a retributive punishment for wasting human food. In a wild and excited manner he also related that his brother one day, whilst returning to pick up some dead birds which he had left on the coast, observed some feathers ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... permitted to leave Florence in the train of the young Cardinal, immediately before the reception of the Interdict. He returned to Rome and abandoned himself to a life of profligacy; his palace became a brothel and a gambling hell, and there he lived for ten years, dishonoured and diseased. His retributive death was by the hand ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... and an Eve were left in every country and left free, it would be better than it had been before. 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. Memories of the disunion sentiments contained in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were still fresher, although Jefferson's close connection with the latter was not yet ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... and upon sober after-thought I am fully satisfied that this is a resort of a certain class of disreputable characters, half shepherds, half brigands, who are only kept from turning full-fledged freebooters by a wholesome fear of retributive justice. While I am discussing my bread and water one of these worthies saunters with assumed carelessness up behind me and makes a grab for my revolver, the butt of which he sees protruding from the holster. Although I am not exactly anticipating this movement, travelling alone among ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral level at which the belief—not in a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls prolonged after death—is without its value. At the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... Desolation is everywhere. The barbarians trample beneath their heavy feet the proud trophies of ancient art and power. The glimmering life-sparks of the old civilization disappear. The world is abandoned to fear, misery, and despair, and there is no help, for retributive justice marches on with impressive solemnity. Imperial despotism, disproportionate fortunes, unequal divisions of society, the degradation of woman, slavery, Epicurean pleasures, practical atheism, bring forth their wretched fruits. The vices and miseries ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... goddess, the allayer of pain and the soother of sorrows, or the impersonation of stern retributive justice. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this vast scheme of territorial aggrandizement, we see Cortez dying in obscurity and Pizarro assassinated in his palace, while retributive justice has overtaken the monarchy at whose behest the richest portions of the Western Continent were violently wrested from ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... it. He is sometimes even as uninteresting as he found other people; but the tiresome passages, thank God, all belong to the house of Este! His panegyrics of Ippolito and his ancestors recoiled on the poet with a retributive dulness. ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... in former days, and could be identified as soldiers as they passed only with difficulty. Others would pause on their trip at some plantation, ascertain the name of the 'meanest' overseer on the place, then tie him backward on a horse and force him to accompany them. Particularly retributive were the punishments visited upon Messrs. Mays and Prevatt—generally recognized as the most vicious slave drivers of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... to the spoiler. The late Rev. James Rust, in his Druidism Exhumed, mentions that circles stood on the spot where one of the extensive manufactories at Grandholm, near Aberdeen, has been built. The people, shocked at the removal of the Druidical works, predicted retributive justice to those who disturbed the sacred relics. For a long time every misadventure to the company, or to individuals connected therewith, was attributed to the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... the door. "I know!" he cried, before I could answer. "This is the benevolent gentleman who looked like the refuge of the afflicted when I saw him last.—You have altered for the worse since then, sir. You have stepped into quite a new character—you personify Retributive Justice now.—Your new protector, Mrs. Valeria—I understand!" He bowed low to Benjamin, with ferocious irony. "Your humble servant, Mr. Retributive Justice! I have deserved you—and I submit to you. Walk in, sir! I will take care that your new office shall ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... hominem, which makes the crime in imagination our own, to bribe us into an utterly ruinous indulgence towards it? 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. To prove that this is not the principle of judicial punishment, we have only to call to mind that, whereas, in a moral point of view, the force of temptation diminishes the guilt, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... brutal about this laugh of Bucholz that caused the detective involuntarily to shudder as he gazed upon him. Here between the narrow walls of a prison cell he stood face to face with a man who had taken a human life, and who stood almost in the awful presence of retributive justice, yet his laugh was as clear and ringing, and his face as genial as though no trial awaited him and no judgment ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... who fall into exclusive habits of self-indulgence, and forget their natural sympathy and close connexion with everybody and everything in the world around them, not only neglect the first duty of life, but, by a happy retributive justice, deprive themselves of its truest and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... expressed much regret; whilst his good lady, I fancied, was not very sorry to have her predictions fulfilled at so cheap a rate. I ventured to hint to my friend something about retributive justice, alluding to his fishy longings amongst the pools; but he rejected the application with indignation, insisting upon it that his desire to secure that fine fish was founded in ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... a time? It was but a twelvemonth since he had saddened and shadowed Guy's short life and love with the very suffering from uncertainty that he found so hard to bear. As he remembered this, he had a sort of fierce satisfaction in enduring this retributive justice; though there were moods when he felt the torture so acutely, that it seemed to him as if his brain would turn if he saw them depart, and was left behind to ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delicate perfume went up from my garments, that my voice was more than usually winning. I experienced a dangerous sense of satisfaction in the conquest of this unsophisticated youth—a conquest not wholly without its retributive ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Figurantes (never plump on earth) admire, while with uplifted toe retributive you inflict vengeance incorporeal upon the shadowy rear ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... with the Puritan blood will easily understand the sort of dark, underlying deposit of unutterable sadness that often reminds such persons of their austere ancestry; but, in addition to this, the Hathornes had now firmly imbibed the belief that their family was under a retributive ban for its share in the awful severities of the Quaker and the witchcraft periods. It was not to them the symbolic and picturesque thing that it is to us, but a real overhanging, intermittent oppressiveness, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... The unfortunate Dr. Cameron was buried in the Savoy in London. The family of the man who betrayed him is said, in the Highlands, to have been visited with a severe retribution, having, ever since, had one of its members an idiot. Such is the notion of retributive ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... put to death. The widows were all three put into prison, and all the property and estates were confiscated. The movable property amounted to three lakhs of rupees.[7] The Raja boasted to the Governor- General's representative in Bundelkhand of this act of retributive justice, and pretended that it was executed merely as a punishment for the robbery; but it was with infinite difficulty the merchants could recover from him any share of the plundered property out of that confiscated. The Raja alleged that, according to our rules, the chief ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the Canadians. Stung by the boldness and success of Colonel Clarke's adventure, and fearing the effect which it might have on their Indian allies, they seemed determined to achieve a victory over him, and strike a retributive blow against the position which ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... refuse that act of acknowledged justice and, in violation of the law of nations, make reprisals on our part the occasion of hostilities against the United States, she would but add violence to injustice, and could not fail to expose herself to the just censure of civilized nations and to the retributive judgments of Heaven. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... person may sacrifice another to himself, and a fortiori that a people may. If the latter view is taken, by abandoning punishment when it can no longer be expected to prevent an act, the law abandons the retributive and adopts the ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... on the Poetry of Gray," says of this Ode: "The tendency of The Bard is to show the retributive justice that follows an act of tyranny and wickedness; to denounce on Edward, in his person and his progeny, the effect of the crime he had committed in the massacre of the bards; to convince him that neither his ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... gain. God may see that evil is null, and that pain is gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice. This justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however, inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment. Such a theological horror Browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a humorous contempt, in his apologue of A Camel-driver; her driver, if the camel bites, will with good cause thwack, and so instruct the brute that mouths should munch not bite; he will ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... doubtless in our possession—the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—and the way is open into Maryland and Pennsylvania. It is believed Hooker's army is utterly demoralized, and that Lee is going on. This time, perhaps, no Sharpsburg will embarrass his progress, and the long longed-for day of retributive invasion ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... sweeping spruce, out of which whirred clouds of pheasants, and scuttling rabbits, and stupid hares kept crossing and recrossing, to the derangement of Mr. Watchorn's temper, and the detriment of the unsteady pack. Squeak, squeak, squeal sounded right and left, followed sometimes by the heavy retributive hand of Justice on the offenders' hides, and sometimes by the snarl, snap, and worry of a couple of hounds contending for the prey. Twang, twang, twang, still went the horn; and when the huntsman reached the unicorn-crested gates, between tea-caddy looking ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... nearly passed away, and time had, in some measure, thrown its softening veil over the past, he was suffered to regain his liberty.17 But he came forth an aged man, bent down with infirmities and broken in spirit,—an object of pity, rather than indignation. Rarely has retributive justice been meted out in fuller measure to offenders so high in authority,—most ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Hudson's Bay Company, nor to hunt foxes for their brushes instead of their skins, or think the poor little black tails of a Siberian weasel on a judge's shoulders may constitute him therefore a Minos in matters of retributive justice, or an AEacus in distributive, who can at once determine how many millions a Railroad Company are to make the public pay for not granting them their exclusive ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... along with them a share of those principles, qualities, and attributes that characterize that state, though predominating in very different degrees and proportions; either according to their respective capacities, or the retributive awards of an eternal ordination. Among others it is specially noted, that as Brahm at that time had awakened into a consciousness of his own existence, there does inhere in each separated soul ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... prosperity, my Lord the Infant never cherished hatred or ill will against any, even though they had grievously offended him, so that some, who spoke as if they knew everything, said that he was wanting in retributive justice, though in all other ways most impartial. Thus they complained that he forgave some of his soldiers who deserted him in the attack on Tangier, when he was in the greatest danger. He was wholly given up to the public service, and was always glad to try new plans for the welfare of the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Imagine his sorrow and the heaviness of his aged heart when he learned that the good wife had bestowed thereof upon her brother bountiful largess exceeding his merit. Sadly and prayerfully while she slept lifted he the retributive mallet and beat in her brittle pate. Then with the quiet dignity of one who has redressed a grievous wrong, surrendered himself unto the law this worthy old man. Let him who has never known the great grief of slaughtering a wife judge him harshly. He that is without sin among you, let ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... considered, what a picture of repeated tortures does it present! But, even the cruelty of the narration is exceeded by the patient meekness with which it was endured. Here are no expressions of malice, no invocations even of God's retributive justice, not a complaint of suffering wrongfully! On the contrary, praise to God, forgiveness of sin, and a forgiving all the world, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... you, who love your ease too much ever to be sensible of the boiling emotions of a soul like mine! You are Guy Fairfax; I am Coke Clifton. Not but I should have imagined the swelling volumes of injuries I have communicated would have lighted up a sympathetic flame of retributive vengeance even in you, which not all your phlegm could have quenched. But no matter—Though heaven, earth, and hell were to face me frowning, I would on! My purpose is fixed: let it but be accomplished, and consequences to myself will be the least ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... construction of some of the rules of the gospel, no one can deny that they do, whether figurative or not, forbid retaliation and revenge; that they do assume that men are not to be judges and executioners of their own wrongs; but that injuries are to be borne with meekness, and that retributive justice must be left to God, and to the laws. If a man strikes, we are not to return the blow, but appeal to the laws. If a man uses abusive or invidious language, we are not to return railing for railing. If a man impeaches our motives and attacks our character, we are not to return ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... and consequently, that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay, positive injustice, in the administration of affairs, both in the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave; must, I think, be allowed by every one who will give himself a moment's reflection. I will go farther, and affirm that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... should elect to return to San Pasqual on the very day that Borax O'Rourke issued formal written notice through old Judge Kenny for Donna to vacate the Hat Ranch, which stood upon the desert land whereon he had filed, is one of the mysteries of retributive justice with which this story has nothing to do. Suffice the fact that Mr. Hennage had stayed away from San Pasqual six months, and six months is a sufficient lapse of time for any ordinary public excitement to wear off, particularly in the desert. He had ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... of her family, to which she was so mainly instrumental, is not now known. In all likelihood she dragged on a miserable existence, a forlorn outcast, pointed at by the hand of scorn, or avoided with looks of horror in the wilds of Pendle. As if some retributive punishment awaited her, she is reported to have been the Jennet Davies who was condemned in 1633, on the evidence of Edmund Robinson the younger, with Mother Dickenson and others, but not executed. Her confession, if she made one at the second trial, might not have been unsimilar to that of Alexander ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... the denoument depends. It is upon her guilty lover that the author projects most frequently the cold, thin rays of his fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a little luminous circle, on the edge of which hovers the livid and sinister figure of the injured and retributive husband. The story goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband—the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... escape, considering how closely he was guarded, a few hours before, and secreted himself in the very chamber where he had left poor Fleetword to starvation, little imagining that he was standing on the threshold of retributive justice. He had caught at flight, even so far, as a sort of reprieve; and was forming plans of future villany at the very moment the train was fired. God have mercy on all sinners! it is fearful to be cut off without time for repentance. Sir Willmott had none. In ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... "Achilles' ferocious treatment of the corpse of Hector cannot but offend as referred to the modern standard of humanity. The heroic age, however, must be judged by its own moral laws. Retributive vengeance on the dead, as well as the living, was a duty inculcated by the religion of those barbarous times which not only taught that evil inflicted on the author of evil was a solace to the injured man; but made the welfare of the soul ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... sarcasm, as woman, creature, or thing, for losing their hearts to her husband. But life, what was it, and who was she? She had, like the singer of the psalm of Asaph, been plagued and chastened all the day long; but could she, by retributive words, in order to please herself—the individual—"offend against the generation," ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... aside, and were womanly, and natural, and sincere; where, to gain or to keep their treasure, they would gladly have broken their wand, they failed utterly, and found they were only half omnipotent. The justice was retributive, but it was very complete. Be sure, with those passionate natures, the honey of a thousand triumphs never deadened the sting of the one discomfiture. Suitors flocking from every shore and island of the AEgean never made Sappho forget, for one hour, that stubborn impassible Phaon. No wonder ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... from the Chinese laundry of one Fung Ti of Fiddletown, has been described to me as peculiarly affecting. Yet I am satisfied that a higher nature, rising above the levity induced by the mere contemplation of the insignificant details of this breach of trust, would find ample retributive justice in the difficulties that subsequently attended Ah ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... symbol of the world hardened in unbelief and rebellion, and hastening on to meet the retributive judgments of God. The woes of a fallen race, pressing upon His soul, forced from His lips that exceeding bitter cry. He saw the record of sin traced in human misery, tears, and blood; His heart was moved with infinite ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... mutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty "retributive justice," and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not "sovereign" enough. But today we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the Tower, the Earl Cornwallis, a good and loyal nobleman, who is, at this moment, fighting the rebels in my own native province, Christopher," interrupted the colonel; "that will be what I call retributive justice; but," continued the veteran, rising with an air of gentlemanly dignity, "it will not do to permit even the constable of the Tower of London to surpass the master of St. Ruth in hospitality and kindness to ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... require more than twelve hours to come to an understanding with a lady irrevocably in his power. And all the while, deep in this bold villain's breast lurked a dark, fierce, terrible reflection that one more crime, only one more—almost, indeed, an act of wild retributive justice on his confederate—and that proud, tameless woman would be crouching in the dust, praying for mercy at the feet of the desperate man she ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... The thought came to her: was it retributive justice pursuing her for having bartered herself for rank? And yet girls as good and better than she, did it every day. She rose and began pacing up and down the floor. What should she do? "Go back to Lady Helena," said the letter. Go back! cast ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... views, and, if it does not imply the absolute immortality of the soul, at least asserts its existence after the death of the body, for the disembodied spirit becomes incarnate again as soon as it finds a tenement which fits it. To their life after death the Pythagoreans added a doctrine of retributive rewards and punishments, and, in this respect, what has been said of animals forming a penitential mechanism in the theology of India and Egypt, holds good for the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Taenarus, in Sparta, from whence he went to Corinth. It would have been well for the mutineers if their taste for music had been as great as the dolphin's, for the history not only affords a grand instance of the power of music, but of retributive justice, as the sailors accidentally going to Corinth, paid the penalty of their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... this all-absorbing subject, Venetia could never summon courage to speak upon it to her mother. Her first disobedience, or rather her first deception of her mother, in reference to this very subject, had brought, and brought so swiftly on its retributive wings, such disastrous consequences, that any allusion to Lady Annabel was restrained by a species of superstitious fear, against which Venetia could not contend. Then her father was either dead or living. That was certain. If dead, it was clear that his memory, however ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... among the lower classes in reference to an unfortunate or crippled child. Here the word ingwa is used especially in the retributive sense. It usually signifies evil karma; kwaho being the term used in speaking of meritorious karma and its results. While an unfortunate child is spoken of as "a child of ingwa," a very lucky person is called a "kwaho-mono,"— ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?—I refer to Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr. Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... now, while fortune smiled upon them; while they revelled in the rewards of successful villany, retributive justice came upon them in a shape they had not anticipated. Jealousy and mistrust sprang up between the two confederates, and led to such violent and frequent quarrels, that Dee was in constant fear of exposure. Kelly imagined himself a much greater personage ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... revealed in all his terrible features until this hindrance was removed out of the way. Imperial Rome for three centuries stood as the great opposer of God's people and slaughtered thousands, perhaps millions, of the Lord's innocent servants, and the hand of retributive Justice was finally extended to humble her to the dust. Singularly, the persons whom God made choice of to effect her downfall have either regarded themselves as special instruments whose mission it was to punish the world or else have received such designations by historians because of their ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... their chiefs, he inveighed against their craven policy, and urged the necessity of vigorous and retributive measures that would check the confidence and presumption of their enemies, if not inspire them with awe. For this purpose, he advised that a war party should be immediately sent off on the trail of the marauders, to follow them, if necessary, into the very heart ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... of the early Greeks respecting the dispensations of an overruling Providence, as shown in their belief in retributive justice, are especially prominent in some of the sublime choruses of the Greek tragedians, and in the "Works and Days" of Hesiod. For instance, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... than animal oils or well-furred skins, and their cupidity and avarice were found at once particularly hateful and particularly useful: hateful when seen as a reason for punishing them by mulcting or robbery, useful when this retributive process could be successfully carried forward. Kings and emperors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of subjects who could gather and yield money; but edicts issued to protect "the King's Jews" equally with the King's game from being harassed and hunted by ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... and Paulina had the interview described above. And now it seemed as though Fate itself were conspiring with the conspirators, for the watch kept upon them by Andrew Larkspur was perforce delayed, and Lady Eversleigh's designs of retributive punishment were suspended. A few days after the return of Mr. Larkspur to town, that gentleman was seized with serious illness, and for three weeks was unable to leave his bed. Mr. Andrew lay ill with ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... invaded rights, must be exercised with the certain assurance of retaliation, not only in the limited operation of war in this part of the King's Dominions, but in every quarter of the globe. For the national character of Britain is not less distinguished for humanity than strict retributive justice, which will consider the execution of this inhuman threat as deliberate murder, for which every subject of the offending ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... were still fresh, and his exhortations calculated to live in the memory. The poems composed on moral subjects generally inculcate a spirit of gentleness toward others and moderation in personal objects. They represent the gods as irresistible, retributive, favoring the good and punishing the bad, though sometimes very tardily. But his compositions on special and present occasions are usually conceived in a more vigorous spirit; denouncing the oppressions of the rich ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... scabbard of the sword. In the wrestling, the springing in and recoil, the sword slipped from the scabbard. Without intention to five or six inches it pierced the shoulder. Atto! The wife fell—"Namu Sambo[u]!"[42] Plucking out the sword O'Iwa cast it aside. By the action of retributive fate the point of the weapon pierced the chest of Kosuke. The wound was fatal. Seven revolutions and a fall: alas! he was dying. Close under his feet the blow of Iemon had reached the child. With but a single cry forthwith he died. At the accident the husband ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the prevailing degeneracy it certainly could not save what was not worth preserving. The strong grasp which Rome had laid upon the splendors of all the ancient Pagan Civilizations was to be relaxed. Antiquity had lived out its life. The empire of the Caesars was doomed. Retributive justice must march on in its majestic course. The empire had accomplished its mission; the time came for it to die. The Sibylline oracle must needs be fulfilled: "O haughty Rome, the divine chastisement shall come upon ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... humanity shudders, marked the history of the buccaneers. Their motives were the same as those which had governed the conduct of Cortez; and they, too, found a salvo for their consciences by persuading themselves that they were commissioned as a court of vengeance—the instruments of retributive justice in the hands of Providence—to punish the Spaniards for the remorseless cruelties practised upon the unoffending Mexicans. And here another extraordinary fact may be noted in the history of the buccaneers. After their community ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... perspiration flowed from his pallid face. Yet, with the exception of his own clique, there was scarcely an individual present who did not hope that this trial would put an end to his career of blood. After all, there was something of the retributive justice of Providence even in the conduct and feelings of the jury; for, in point of fact, it was more on account of his private crimes and private infamy that they, however wrongly, brought in their verdict. Here was he, encircled by their knowledge of ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... had known it, Kenrick would have used to describe him. If he set an imposition, the imposition must be done, and must be done at a certain time, without appeal, and causa indicta. Mr Paton was as deaf as Pluto to all excuses, and as inexorable as Rhadamanthus in his retributive dispensations. Neither Orpheus nor Amphion would have moved him. Orpheus might have made all the desks and forms dance round as they listened to his song, but he could never have got Mr Paton to let off ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... ship Princess for Holland. The vessel was wrecked on the coast of Wales Kieft and eighty-one men, women and children sank into a watery grave. Kieft died unlamented. His death was generally regarded as an act of retributive justice. ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... pleasure to state that the present work is unexceptionable in this respect, while the cases possess extraordinary interest, and are replete with instruction. They afford much insight of human motives, and teach impressive lessons of the retributive justice of Providence, and the misery and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... reprieved from death by King George in consideration of his provocation; for was he not, like Wat Tyler, the girl's father? She remembered what she accounted that man's only weakness—his dwelling with joy on the sound of the hammer-stroke of his swift, retributive justice—the concussion of the remorseless wrought iron on the split skull of a human beast. She remembered his words with a shudder:—"Ay, mistress, I can shut my eyes and listen for it now. And many was the time it gave ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... warriors were deeply impressed with the Gospel message was evident, but it was equally evident that the former was not to be moved from his decision, and in this the warriors sympathised with him. His strong convictions in regard to retributive justice were not ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... that had brought on this syncope. Your only comfort lay in the forced reflection, that, real as he looked, the poor caitiff was but imaginary, a bit of painted canvass, whom no delirium tremens, nor so much as a retributive headache, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had in mind to do toward assisting the march of retributive justice is immaterial—since he did not do it. Even as he spoke—in these terms of doom that qualifying conditions rendered doomless—the man suddenly dodged past him, bolted across the platform, jumped to the ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... some British officers, who made a sortie from the Canada shores; which circumstance, having been handed down from father to son, still rankles in the bosoms of many of the older inhabitants, who do not fail to state their belief that retributive justice will eventually be administered by the entire subjugation of Canada. During my rather prolonged stay in Buffalo, I had frequent opportunities of discovering that the most rancorous feelings exist on ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... I felt the importance of obtaining the declaration, which I had no doubt would establish my innocence—I ran for my father and Sergeant Lindsay, and, to make assurance doubly sure, brought two of the privates also along with me. It was a striking scene of retributive justice, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... that became your cause, Still burns its lengthening path across the years; We feel its raptures, and we see its tears And ponder on its retributive laws. Time keeps that deathless story ever new; Yet finds no answer, when we ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dreaded; their hearts laboring and pounding. For they saw in the face of this man who had brought his pony to a halt within ten feet of them a decision to adhere to the principles that had governed him all his days, and they knew that a woman's order would not stay the retributive impulse that ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... triumphant, will weep down Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs, Too much avenged by those who err. I wait, Enduring thus, the retributive hour Which since we spake is ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... *the relations of the individual human soul to God*, Christianity opens to our view a department of duty paramount to all others in importance and interest. His fatherly love and care, his moral government and discipline, his retributive providence, define with unmistakable distinctness certain corresponding modes, in part, of outward action, and in still greater part, of action in that inward realm of thought whence the outward life ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... generations of men? I do not deny disease—who could? but suffering and disease have been looked upon from the earliest days as punishments wrought out upon a man for his sins. Now, may not the haunting fear of this retributive justice be greatly responsible for suffering and disease of all kinds, since the mind unquestionably ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... ones. First, that God created man; secondly, that he created him in a state of freedom and happiness surrounded by blessings; third, that the favored subject violated his Sovereign's order; fourth, that in consequence of this offence he was degraded from his blessed condition, beneath a load of retributive ills. The composition shows the characteristics of a philosopheme or a myth, a scheme of conceptions deliberately wrought out to answer an inquiry, a story devised to account for an existing fact or custom. The picture ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... penalty &c. 974; retribution; thunderbolt, Nemesis; requital &c. (reward) 973; penology; retributive justice. lash, scaffold &c. (instrument of punishment) 975; imprisonment &c. (restraint) 751; transportation, banishment, expulsion, exile, involuntary exile, ostracism; penal servitude, hard labor; galleys &c. 975; beating &c.v.; flagellation, fustigation[obs3], gantlet, strappado[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... him. It was as though San Francisco had but one thought, one straight, relentless purpose—the punishment of crime by Mosaic law. The prisoners in the county jail appeared to sense this wave of retributive hatred, for they paced ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... time, and was the subject of some official remonstrances, had nearly ended in a more serious manner. The brother of the lady was an officer in the army, and both the descendants of a poor but ancient family; the indignity offered to his name, and the seduction of his sister, called forth the retributive feelings of a just revenge; he sought out the offender, challenged him, but gave him the option of redeeming his sister's honour and his own by marriage. Alas! that was impossible; the earl was ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... over the sea-slug exposed by receding tide, and vexing it by jeers, caused it to exude glutinous threads which the swift seized and bore away to its cave to be consolidated and moulded into a nest. To the fable was appended a retributive moral, viz., that the bche-de-mer occasionally revenged itself by expelling such a complicated mass of gluten that it became a net for the capture of the swift, which was slowly assimilated by its enemy. The Chinese, it may be said, with but slight perversion of fact, show equal partiality ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... and castigator of his age—a reformer in philosophy, in politics, in religion—denouncing its mechanical method of thinking, deploring its utter want of faith, and threatening political society, obstinately deaf to the voice of wisdom, with the retributive horrors of repeated revolutions; and yet neither in philosophy, in religion, nor in politics, has Mr Carlyle any distinct dogma, creed, or constitution to promulgate. The age is irreligious, he exclaims, and the vague feeling of the impenetrable mystery which encompasses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... retributive attends the deed That wreaks prevenient wrong. Deceit, matched with deceit, makes recompense Of evil, not of kindness. Get thee forth! Desert that seat again, and from this land Unmooring speed thee away, lest on our state Thou bring some ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Nikasti had slipped noiselessly from the room. Pamela made no effort to detain him. She had a curious feeling that the things which had passed between them concerned their two selves only. So had no desire whatever to hand him over to retributive justice. ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pick up her devoted crew, few of whom could be saved. The fate of these men, after the gallantry which they had displayed, particularly affected Nelson; for there was nothing in this action of that indignation against the enemy, and that impression of retributive justice, which at the Nile had given a sterner temper to his mind, and a sense of austere delight in beholding the vengeance of which he was the appointed minister. The Danes were an honourable foe; they were of English mould as well as English blood; and now that the ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... accepted their contributions. Here, indeed, were the supermen of the mad German prophet and philosopher come to life, refuting all classic tragedy. It is true that some of these supermen were occasionally swept away by disease, which in ancient days would have been regarded as a retributive scourge, but was in fact nothing but the logical working of the laws of hygiene, the result of overwork. Such, though stated more crudely, were my contentions when desire did not cloud my brain and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... discharge of his. Theologians have raised the question whether God's covenant is of this kind. Surely it is. His promises to Israel had an 'if,' and the fulfilment of the conditions necessarily secured the accomplishment of the promises. The ritual of the first covenant transcends the strictly retributive compact which it ratified, and shadows a gospel beyond law, even the new covenant which brings better gifts, and does not turn on 'do,' but simply on the sprinkling with the blood of Jesus. The words of Moses ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... world must be very careful not to suffer his nice sense of retributive justice, to get so much the better of his judgment, as an artist, as to make him forgetful of human probabilities, and the superior duty of preparing the mind of the young reader by sterling examples of patience and protracted reward, to bear up manfully against injustice, and not to despond ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... persecuted of all ages have been ready, not without reason, to recognize in signal disasters befalling their enemies the retributive hand of the Almighty himself lifting for a moment the veil of futurity, to disclose a little of the misery that awaits the evil-doer in another world. But, in the present instance, it is a candid historian of different faith who does not hesitate to ascribe to a special ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... assuredly will not hesitate at another. Such cases are gene rally marked by some circumstances that betray its character, and naturally rouse the indignation of the Government. If the only consequence was the punishment of the guilty, we should rejoice in such retributive justice; but, unfortunately and too frequently, it happens, that the station belongs to a stockholder, who, both from feelings of interest and humanity, has treated the natives with every consideration, and discountenanced ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... with me at school or college? and what might I not have been had you not, when I was struck down by illness, taken advantage of my weakness, and by sending me to a madhouse, confirmed my malady; but fool as you called me, I can see that Heaven's retributive justice has chastised you through life. Me you got into your power on the ground that I was insane, and the mind of the daughter, in whom you took such pride, often totters on its throne; her son was carried off, as was the rightful heir, and for long weary years has she waited his return, while ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston |
