Now, Oldcorne, being a man as good as he was clever, and as clever as he was good, manifests from the inherent nature of his answer to Humphrey Littleton a sense, a consciousness, an assurance of freedom from the restraints and obligations which would have undoubtedly stayed and bound him had he not been already freed from their power.

Now, it is a superior power that countervails, that renders impotent an inferior power.

Now, Oldcorne would be freed from the restraining power of moral obligations, as to the user of a particular character of speech, if he had had residing within him a power of superior, of sublimer, that is, of countervailing force.

Now, Oldcorne, in his answer to Littleton, manifestly gives evidence of power, of countervailing power.

Knowledge gives power: gives countervailing power.

Therefore it follows that the presence of power, of countervailing power, in Oldcorne proves likewise the strong probability of knowledge, of countervailing knowledge likewise.

And what kind of knowledge can such two-fold knowledge have been, save a meritorious knowledge of what aforetime had been, but which was then no longer, the Gunpowder Treason Plot?

For, from the very moment of Oldcorne’s becoming conscious that the Plot as a plot had vanished into thin air by (1) personal, actual repentance; by (2) imputed or constructive repentance; by (3) a personally heroic act: had vanished like the morning mists before the beams of the rising sun, Oldcorne would feel himself, so to speak, immediately to be endued with an extraordinary power: with a power that would straightway cause him to grow to a loftier stature than all his fellows: with a power that then would enable him, as it were, to scale the heights, and, at length, to mount up to the very top of what aforetime had been the baleful Plot, but which Plot Oldcorne full well knew would be henceforward and for ever emptied and defecated of and from all murderous, criminous, sacrilegious quality.[166]

Hence was Oldcorne warranted, justified, and vindicated in viewing and surveying “the fact of Mr. Catesbie’s” simply speculatively and purely in the abstract.

Hence was Oldcorne warranted, justified, and vindicated in leaving Humphrey Littleton in abstracto, after the latter had propounded to him his dangerous question: of leaving the doubter with an answer sounding in partial truth alone.