[A] Or, it may be said, Oldcorne separated concrete truth from abstract truth, practical truth from speculative truth, holding the former in solution, and putting into the hands of Littleton the latter alone, in the form of a dangerous precipitate.
Now, I maintain that, regard being had to the terrific danger of Littleton’s occasioning mischief, either through stupidity, malice, or both, a man of the intellectual and moral calibre of Edward Oldcorne would have never suffered his tongue to give utterance to a proposition dividing, as with a sword, concrete truth from abstract truth, practical truth from speculative truth, and then
holding the former suspended above the head of his questioner, unless and until that great Priest and Jesuit had been first possessed of the living consciousness that he had had, and then was, at that very instant of time when speaking, having that Plot, which represented “the sum of all villainies,” in that it involved “sacrilegious murder,”[A] firmly and unconquerably crushed under his feet.[164]
[A] This phrase is used by Shakespeare in “Macbeth” (1606), I suggest, with indirect reference to the Gunpowder Plot, which Shakespeare must have followed with the most breathless, absorbing interest. For Norbrook was in Snitterfield, where his mother (Mary Arden) had property; while Coughton was the home of the Throckmortons, the Ardens’ relatives. Clopton House, where Ambrose Rookwood was living from Michaelmas, 1605, Lapworth, where John Wright resided from May, 1605, and where Christopher Wright and Marmaduke Ward visited him (all of which places were in that “garden of England,” Warwickshire), must have been as familiar to the poet almost as his own Stratford-on-Avon.
I find the name “Robert Arden,” of Pedmore, Worcestershire, 11⁄2 miles from Stourbridge, down as “a popish recusant” for the year 1592, in the “Hatfield MS.,” part iv.
CHAPTER LXII.
And how could this be?
It could be only by dint of a two-fold knowledge, a two-fold, warranting, justifying, vindicating knowledge, which this Priest and Jesuit held stored-up deep down within the depths of his conscious being, a knowledge passive or receptive which had come to him “from without,” ab extra; a knowledge active or self-caused which he had bestowed upon himself “from within,” ab intra.