Chapter LIX

Now, the contention is this: That regard being had to the extraordinary heinousness of the Gunpowder Plot, in point of underhand stealthiness and secrecy as well as of deliberateness, malice, magnitude, and cruelty, no man of moral uprightness and intellectual keenness could be — without doing a violence to his human nature that is all but incredible — so unspeakably reckless and utterly insane as to fling broadcast to the winds, for the wayfaring man and the fool to pick up and con for their own and their hapless fellow-creatures’ moral destruction, an oral statement as to this diabolical Plot, that expressed ways of looking at the Plot merely speculative and simply in the abstract,[A] save and except on one condition only, namely, that such speaker had had both from without and from within, et ab extra et ab intra, a special knowledge.

Furthermore, a special knowledge, with absolute certitude, which warranted the speaker in mentally surveying that Plot not merely as it then was at the moment when he was giving utterance to his speculative statement concerning it, but, as he full well knew, at some point of time prior to that fateful day, November the 5th, 1605, it had been destined to be perpetually, namely, A PLOT ante factum in æternum, a mere abstract mental plan for ever. Aye, a mere abstract mental plan to all eternity; because transmuted and transformed by some process wherein that speaker had himself taken a primal, an essential, a meritorious part.[A]