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The guerillas and their chiefs were always popular, a fatal circumstance due to the War of Independence, one of those good things which have been the origin of an infinite number of detestable things. Corruptio optimi pessima.
Corruptio optimi pessima. It must be remembered too that simultaneous with this sexual disruption occurred the disruption of other human relations; and we cease to be surprised that disease and selfish passions, greed, jealousy, slander, cruelty, and wholesale murder, raged and have raged ever since.
"Deutschland über Alles" might perhaps mean first to the German "My country before everything to me." Corruptio optimi pessima, it easily becomes "Germany over all," the country which dominates an inferior world and is thus the condensed motto of supreme insolence. "Insolence breeds the tyrant," and the doom the ancient poet prophesies is the divine ordinance to be fulfilled by the action of man.
He recalled Gibbon's lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen's grave doubt whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered by the Roman Empire can be said to be substantially happier now than in the days of Severus. O corruptio optimi!
Milton's capacity of emotion, when once he became champion of a cause, could not be contained within the bounds of ordinary speech. It breaks into ferocious reprobation, into terrific blasts of vituperation, beneath which the very language creaks, as the timbers of a ship in a storm. Corruptio optimi pessima. The archangel is recognisable by the energy of his malice.
Froude got at so grotesque a union of words as 'Ark Raleigh' fades before the greater puzzle of guessing what idea he attached to the words 'Ark Raleigh' when he had got them together." When Freeman was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay. Corruptio optimi pessima.
Others again, holding the same notion, but not considering that "corruptio optimi pessima," have been in all ages somewhat inclined to be merciful to superstition, as a child of reverence; as a mere accidental misdirection of one of the noblest and most wholesome faculties of man.
Corruptio optimi pessima: in unskilled hands this doctrine is certainly apt to become a danger to religion itself; nevertheless, rightly applied, there is probably no more potent instrument than this to help us in that reconstruction of belief which is admittedly the urgent business of our age.
We notice in this attitude an unconscious recognition of the sanctity of the religious state; but we see behind it a Pharisaic spirit that exaggerates evil at the expense of justice. Now, if the principle that abuse destroys use is applied to all things, nothing will remain standing, and the best will go first. Corruptio optimi pessima.
Vulgarised as it has been by Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and others who shall be nameless, it has been like every other corruptio optimi pessimum: used as a hieroglyph by the help of which we may better acknowledge the height and depth of our own ignorance, and at the same time express our sense that there is an unseen world with which we in some mysterious way come into contact, though the writs of our thoughts do not run within it used in this way, the idea and the word have been found enduringly convenient.
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