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_. [Footnote A: It is to be noted that in this momentous Declaration of the 12th March, 1605-6, Oldcorne in the first part reserves or conceals “_partial truth_;” that is to say, in _this_ case, _truth in the concrete, or truth in action_. While in the second part of the Declaration Oldcorne orally disclaims, denies, or dissembles integral truth, that is here a special and particular knowledge of the end the plotters had in view, and the means they purposed to adopt. The knowledge he had received was of a nature _official_, and at least conditionally, though not absolutely, _private_ 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] [Footnote A: The argument is that a man at once good and clever, like Edward Oldcorne, would not, according to the rules that govern human nature and daily experience, have clothed in words and then let loose to wander about the world seeking whom it might fall in with and victimize, a bare abstract proposition regarding the Plot, _unless_ he had been first absolutely certain that the foundation-thing, the Plot itself, was too attenuated and ghost-like to work hurt or mischief to any human creature.