1. Preliminaries

17. About the first one needs to know that just as justice is double - habitual, namely charity and grace, and actual, namely the rectitude that is of a nature to be present in an elicited act (and the first is plain; the second is made clear because the act is of a nature to be elicited conformably to its rule, and in this conformity does rectitude consist) - so, since opposites are said in equally many ways, injustice too will be double: habitual, namely the privation of grace in him in whom grace should be present, and actual, namely privation of this rectitude in an act in which it should be present.

18. Also, after the intrinsic and extrinsic act pass away, there remains a certain habitual injustice; but not from this alone is someone said to be a sinner, because someone who had committed two thousand mortal sins and someone who had committed one would be equally sinners intensively and extensively, because the whole of grace in them as to intension, and it alone as to extension, is taken away, both in him who has committed a single less grave sin and in him who has committed two thousand very grave sins; and so the one will not be said to be less a sinner after the act has passed away than the other. The proof of the assumption is that in any mortal sin grace is so taken away that nothing of it remains, and consequently it can, through nothing that follows, become more intense or more extensive, speaking of habitual privation; because this privation deprives only one habit, just as the habit is only of a nature to be present as one.

19. And this reasoning is like the reasoning of Anselm, On Virginal Conception ch.22, that original sin is not of a nature to be more present in one than another, because he in whom there is no justice cannot be deprived of justice [sc. since original sin takes away the whole of justice, it cannot take more away from one than from another, but all are deprived and deprived equally, because deprived fully]. This was discussed in Ord. II dd.30-32 nn.51-56.

20. Now actual injustice cannot remain when the act ceases, because the proximate subject of it is the act, just as it is also of the opposed rectitude. The proof: for the soul cannot be the immediate subject of the rectitude but only of the act in the soul; but still, when the act does not remain, that rectitude does not remain nor the wrongness.