Now, “Morality is the science of duty.”[161] But, just as it is most mischievous _indiscriminately_ to apply abstract principles of morality, however faultless in themselves, to the complex affairs of individuals and of States, so is it most dangerous to strew broadcast statements of the abstract principles of ethics for the untutored mind of the _merely_ practical man——first of all, to misunderstand; and, secondly, to wrest to his own undoing and that of his equally unfortunate fellow-men. This is certainly so in the present stage of the world’s imperfect education. Though one lives in the hope that sooner or later that “ampler day” may dawn, when, from the least unto the greatest, men shall come to have a happy conscious realization of the truth of the poet’s dictum: “_Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_;”[162] “Happy is he who hath been able to learn the causes of things.” Still, _truth——that which is——is truth_. _And partial truth is not less true, according to its measure and in its degree, than the full orb of truth._[A] [Footnote A: Strategy in war has for its intellectual and moral justification the fact that partial truth is not less true, in its measure and in its degree, than the full orb of truth.] Furthermore, “Wisdom is justified by all her children;” even although some of those children are tardy in realizing and in expressing their sense of such justification. Now, although all this stands to reason——nay, because it is true, is even the perfection of reason——it was an enunciation of principles by Father Oldcorne, which it was more than probable would be misinterpreted by two sets of people, the intellectually stupid and the morally malicious. Nay, it may be allowed that even persons of the highest intelligence and of the utmost good faith——such as, in the last century, the late David Jardine[163]——might easily enough think that Edward Oldcorne deserved condemnation and chiding for thus apparently showing such a marked disposition to look at this grave matter, the moral rightness or wrongness of the Gunpowder Plot, as though it were as purely abstract and scholastic a question as that famous moot of the middle ages: “How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?”[A] [Footnote A: Oldcorne had special private knowledge that the Plot would never be a Plot _executed_, because (1) he knew Christopher Wright had resolved to reveal it; because (2) he knew that his own personal act had ended the Plot by his penning the Letter.] CHAPTER LIX.