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.