air by (1) personal, actual repentance; by (2) imputed or constructive repentance; by (3) a personally heroic act: had vanished like the morning mists before the beams of the rising sun, Oldcorne would feel himself, so to speak, immediately to be endued with an extraordinary power: with a power that would straightway cause him to grow to a loftier stature than all his fellows: with a power that then would enable him, as it were, to scale the heights, and, at length, to mount up to the very top of what aforetime had been the baleful Plot, but which Plot Oldcorne full well knew would be henceforward and for ever emptied and defecated of and from all murderous, criminous, sacrilegious quality.[166]
Hence was Oldcorne warranted, justified, and vindicated in viewing and surveying “the fact of Mr. Catesbie’s” simply speculatively and purely in the abstract.
Hence was Oldcorne warranted, justified, and vindicated in leaving Humphrey Littleton in abstracto, after the latter had propounded to him his dangerous question: of leaving the doubter with an answer sounding in partial truth alone.
CHAPTER LXVI.
Now, this conclusion leads inevitably to the further conclusion that Edward Oldcorne must have had latent within him, deep down within the depths of his conscious being, a particular knowledge, as distinct from a general knowledge, a private knowledge as distinct from a public knowledge, not indeed of this Plot as a plot, but of the Plot after it had been, when it had been, and as it had been first transmuted and transformed, by the causes and processes hereinbefore mentioned: transmuted and transformed into an instrument, sure and certain for the temporal salvation of his fellow-men.
Yea, because Edward Oldcorne’s noblest mental faculty, his conscience, gazing with eagle-eye, sun-filled, yet undazzled and undismayed, upon absolute truth was able unshrinkingly and calmly to bear witness to the other indivisible parts of his rational nature, that his mind in relation to that fell enterprise, which from first to last must have “made the angels weep,” was a mind not only of passive innocence, but of active rectitude, therefore must he have felt himself to be not barely, but abundantly free. Free, because he knew there was no mortal in this world, and no being in the world to come, to condemn him at the bar of eternal Justice; nay, none rightly even to be so much as his accuser: free to survey the baleful scheme purely speculatively: free, orally to express the results of that survey, either as to whole or part, in abstracto, in the abstract merely;
and this notwithstanding the risk of misinterpretation from his questioner’s “want of thought,” or “want of heart.”
For everlastingly was it the truth, that none could gainsay nor resist, that in relation to this matter, at any rate, it was the lofty privilege of Edward Oldcorne — indeed a man, if ever there were such, “elect and precious” — to have been made “a white soul:” to have been made a soul like unto “a star that dwelt apart.”