Now, when deep within the depths of the moral being of Christopher Wright
there first arose that tender day-spring, a realization of guilt and
shame: that crimsoned dawn, a sense of grief and sorrow for those two high
crimes whereby his wretched conscious-self had been made darksome and
deformed: acts, wondrous in the telling, in that soul had been indeed
wrought out; regard being had to the overmastering power of Man’s
conditioned yet free will.
Furthermore, the historical Inquirer cannot but seek, if possible, by the
exercise of the philosophic faculty, to penetrate to what, on the human
side, may have been the originating cause, the moving spring, of the
limited yet responsible moral nature of a guilty creature, whose eyes for
well-nigh three hundred years have been closed by a violent death; of a
guilty creature who, in the awful tragedy of his end, verified in himself,
in the sight of all men, the sublimely terrible words of the old Greek
tragedy, “The guilty suffer.”
For wrong-doing, by a steadfast law of the universal reason, “till time
shall be no more,” will ever entail temporal punishment; and, by nature,
expiation and atonement must be wrought out in the criminal’s own keen
consciousness.
Yet, by a compensating law of universal reason, as inexorable as its
fellow, according as Man does work out that measure of punishment,
expiating and atoning, which to him Destiny has allotted for his guerdon,
in that proportion does his soul regain its forfeited harmoniousness and
peace.
Now the originating cause, the moving spring, in the case of the, I hold,
contrite Christopher Wright was, on the human side, the flooding of his
soul by memories pure and bright of days long, long ago.
I need not labour this point; but in a note I will relate certain facts
concerning her to whom Christopher Wright owed the gifts of life and
nurture, which will sufficiently tell what manner of woman that
Elizabethan Yorkshire mother was, in respect of courage, humanity, and
devotedness to her ideals.[103]
I furthermore opine that, although it was the personal dawning
consciousness of Christopher Wright himself that _primarily_ prompted the
happy step of recourse to Father Edward Oldcorne,[104] yet Christopher
Wright, in my judgment, already had confided the just scruples of his
conscience to the ear, not of a “superior” judicial Priest, but of an
“equal” counselling Layman.
That Layman, I hold, was Thomas Ward, who, belike, heightened and
strengthened his connection’s laudable resolve.[105]
Now, if such were the case, I do not doubt that Father Oldcorne, that
skilled, tried “minister of a mind diseased,” the duties of whose vocation
urged him, with persistent force, promiscuously “to work good unto all
men,” voluntarily offered to pen the immortal Letter; _provided he were
released from the obligations of that solemn secrecy imposed by “the seal
of the Confessional”: released by the Penitent himself, in whom alone
resided the prerogative of granting or withholding such a release_.