1593 Tell-Trothes New-yeares Gift sig. F Fy fy sweete hart..Will strike so deepely into a reformatiue conscience, as there shall not neede out vpon thee.

1641 Short View Prel. Ch. Eng. 10 Whither their Courts bee reformative or deformative.

1762 R. Dobbs Remarkable Accomplishment of Noted Script. Prophecy 11 The Spirit of God moved..upon the Face of the Waters, voluntarily yielding to his divine reformative Impulses.

1791 J. Bentham Panopticon Postscr. ii. 515 This a meliorative, a reformative regimen? I had almost called it a corruptive one.

1859 J. Ogden Sci. of Educ. ii. vi. 454 Its [sc. the rod's] use has been grossly perverted; and instead of its being a reformative measure, it is rather a vindictive one.

1883 M. Davitt in Contemp. Rev. Aug. 173 Under conditions that would lessen the evils just referred to, separate confinement might become a reformative kind of punishment.

1946 Thorpe's Dict. Appl. Chem. (ed. 4) VII. 189/1 Under pressure of reformative legislation..the term ‘refined lard’ was replaced by the expressions ‘compound lard’ or ‘lard compound’.

1998 Times 8 June 23/1 She saw the book as reformative in aim, showing the dangers of imposing inappropriate adult standards upon children.

1858 N. Lord Serm. Dartmouth Coll. 18 A saviour of the world from its wickedness, from the wickedness of the heart, curatively, and thereby only, reformatively, from irregularities of the life.

1993 R. H. Gundry Mark (2004) 885 Mark probably means his audience to infer that Jesus' having reformatively cleansed the temple gave the lie in advance to any testimony which would attribute to him a determination to destroy and replace it.

1824 J. Macculloch Highlands & W. Isles IV. 161 There is an Organ of Reformativeness.

1966 A. F. C. Wallace Religion 164 Other writers have suggested a number of additional characteristics [of revitalization movements]..for consideration: syncretism; utopian (future) orientation; militancy versus withdrawal or passivity; reformativeness; assimilationism; nationalism; and so on.