principle of retribution, that wrongdoing must be expiated by
suffering. But he had not heard the words "Vengeance is Mine;" and
mistakenly supposed it to rest with himself to appoint and carry out
his own measure of revenge. Whether he was quite so invincibly
ignorant on this point, as Grote represents, is open to doubt. At any
rate he was correct in the primary moral judgment on which he
proceeded.

_Reading_.--St. Thos., 1a 2a, q. 94, art. 6.


SECTION III.--_Of the immutability of the Natural Law_.


1. Besides printing, many methods are now in vogue for multiplying
copies of a document. Commonly the document is written out with
special ink on special paper: the copy thus used is called a
_stencil_; and from it other copies are struck off. We will suppose
the stencil to be that page of the Eternal Law written in the Mind of
God, which regulates _human acts_, technically so called. The copies
struck off from that stencil will be the Natural Law in the mind of
this man and of that. Now, as all who are familiar with copying
processes know too well, it happens at times that a copy comes out
very faint, and in parts not at all. These faint and partial copies
represent the Natural Law as it is imperfectly developed in the minds
of many men. In this sense, and as we may say _subjectively_, the
Natural Law is mutable, very mutable indeed. Still, as no one would
say that the document had been altered, because some copies of it were
bad, so it is not strictly correct to say that the Natural Law varies
with these subjective varieties. Appeal would be made to a full and