the earth?" Surely, too, if Holy Writ did not specially mention gunpowder, it constantly threatened one of its ingredients, namely brimstone, to the wicked! [147] Judges iv. 21. [148] Judges v. 24 _seq._ [149] Judges v. 31. [150] Isaiah xlvii. 14. [151] Ezekiel xxi. 32. Under the old dispensation, it was considered a religious duty to fall upon the enemies of the Lord and slay them; under the new, it would be as religious a duty to get under them and slay them. This was merely a detail, a simple reversal of the process, conducing to exactly the same results, and quite as Scriptural in its character. A massacre by means of an explosion of gunpowder was neither a novel nor an exclusively Catholic notion. Persons observed, "There be recounted in histories many attempts of the same kynds, and some also by Protestants in our days: as that of them who at Antwerp placed a whole barke of powder in the great street of that citty, where the prince of Parma with his nobility was to passe: and that of him in the Hague that would have blown up the whole councel of Holland upon private revenge."[152] [152] _Lingard_, Vol. vii. chap, i., footnote. Within the last half century, had not great earls and statesmen, in Scotland, conspired together to blow up with gunpowder the Queen's own husband, as he lay ill in bed, in his house; had not four men been destroyed by this means,[153] and had not the principal conspirator "declared," with how much truth or falsehood it is not necessary to pause here to inquire,[154] "that the Queen"--the very pious martyr-queen, Mary, herself,--"was a consenting party to the deed,"[155] and had not that very pious queen married that very conspirator after he had brought about the murder of her first husband? [153] _Ib._, Vol. vi. chap. ii. [154] Recent historical research tends to absolve Mary Queen of Scots from all imputation of complicity in this horrible crime. [155] Bellesheim's Hist. Cath. Ch. of Scot., trans. H. Blair, Vol. iii. p. 112. It would be scarcely too much to say that, early in the seventeenth century, the ethics of explosives were not properly understood. Catesby might argue that gunpowder was a destructive agent, the primary and natural use of which was to kill directly, and that its indirect use, by exploding it in a tube, thereby propelling a missile, was a secondary, less natural, and possibly less legitimate use. And, if it were objected that to employ it in either way would be right in war, but wrong in peace, he could bring forward the exceedingly dangerous theory (which has been made use of by Irish-American dynamitards in the nineteenth century), that oppressed people, who do not acknowledge the authority of those who rule over them, may consider themselves at war with those authorities, a theory which Catesby's Jesuit friends would have negatived instantly, if he had asked their opinion about it.