Now, in the first part of his Declaration, Father Oldcorne uttered
concerning the Gunpowder Plot a proposition which expressed partial truth
alone. Because he expressed truth in the abstract only, not truth in the
concrete also, concerning that nefarious scheme.
In other words, Father Oldcorne severed in thought the two kinds of truth,
the two aspects of truth, the two parts of truth, which being _unified_
gave the _whole_ truth respecting the moral mode of judging the Gunpowder
Treason Plot.
Oldcorne severed concrete truth from abstract truth,[A] practical truth
from speculative truth, and so far as his hearer, Humphrey Littleton, was
concerned, held that concrete truth, that practical truth, suspended at
the sword-point over Littleton’s head.
[Footnote A: Or, it may be said, Oldcorne separated concrete truth from
abstract truth, practical truth from speculative truth, holding the former
in solution, and putting into the hands of Littleton the latter alone, in
the form of a dangerous precipitate.]
Now, I maintain that, regard being had to the terrific danger of
Littleton’s occasioning mischief, either through stupidity, malice, or
both, a man of the intellectual and moral calibre of Edward Oldcorne would
have never suffered his tongue to give utterance to a proposition
dividing, as with a sword, concrete truth from abstract truth, practical
truth from speculative truth, and then holding the former suspended above
the head of his questioner, _unless and until_ that great Priest and
Jesuit had been first possessed of the living consciousness that he had
had, and then was, at that very instant of time when speaking, having that
Plot, which represented “the sum of all villainies,” in that it involved
“sacrilegious murder,”[A] _firmly and unconquerably crushed under his
feet_.[164]
[Footnote A: This phrase is used by Shakespeare in “Macbeth” (1606), I
suggest, with indirect reference to the Gunpowder Plot, which Shakespeare
must have followed with the most breathless, absorbing interest. For
Norbrook was in Snitterfield, where his mother (Mary Arden) had property;
while Coughton was the home of the Throckmortons, the Ardens’ relatives.
Clopton House, where Ambrose Rookwood was living from Michaelmas, 1605,
Lapworth, where John Wright resided from May, 1605, and where Christopher
Wright and Marmaduke Ward visited him (all of which places were in that
“garden of England,” Warwickshire), must have been as familiar to the poet
almost as his own Stratford-on-Avon.
I find the name “Robert Arden,” of Pedmore, Worcestershire, 1-1/2 miles
from Stourbridge, down as “a popish recusant” for the year 1592, in the
“_Hatfield MS._,” part iv.]