13 Metaphors for corruptions

To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy.

When the minister of public justice thus avows himself the agent of a party, a government, however recent its formation, must be far advanced in depravity; and the corruption of those who are the interpreters of the law has usually been the last effort of expiring power.

The axiom of ancient science, "that the corruption of one thing is the birth of another," had its popular embodiment in the notion that a seed dies before the young plant springs from it; a belief so widespread and so fixed, that Saint Paul appeals to it in one of the most splendid outbursts of his fervid eloquence: "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.

Corruption, on the other hand, is a female impersonation: she (not Death) must be the same as 'the eternal Hunger,' as to whom it is said that 'pity and awe soothe her pale rage.'

In the second place, this belief has made it credible that the plain corruption of authentic epic by oral transmission, or very limited transmission through script, might be the sign of multiple authorship; for if you believe that a whole folk can compose a ballad, you may easily believe that a dozen poets can compose an epic.

Bazot tells us (in his Manuel du Franc-maçon, p. 154) that "the veneration which masons entertain for the east confirms an opinion previously announced, that the religious system of Masonry came from the east, and has reference to the primitive religion, whose first corruption was the worship of the sun."

The corruption of a Poet is the generation of a Statesman.

But while I acknowledge that the natural corruption of my heart, and the bad books I had read, were in part the causes of the sad state I have described, I cannot help also attributing the greatest part of them to the abuses, the superstition, and the errors which disfigure Christianity in the Romish church, and which had so disgusted me that they had driven me into total infidelity.

Meanwhile corruption became year by year more disgracefully flagrant.

[Footnote A: When corruption was the rule in the public service.]

It flashes on every reader whose imagination supplies an unpreoccupied, unrefracting, 'medium' to the Apostolic assertion, that corruption in this passage is a descriptive synonyme of the material sensuous organism common to saint and sinner,standing in precisely the same relation to the man that the testaceous offensive and defensive armour does to the crab and tortoise.

The prevailing indifference to vital religion, the corruptions of society, the decline of domestic piety, and the absence of religion from the education of the upper classes were the themes treated by the writer with unsparing candour and convincing force.

It has happened because the corruption of the best is the worst.

13 Metaphors for  corruptions