If it be objected that “a point of honour” may have stayed and restrained one of the nine conspirators
from “discovering” or revealing his share in the laudable deed, it is demonstrable that it would be a false, not a true, sense of duty that prompted such an unrighteous step.
For the revealing plotter, whoever he was, had duties to his kinsfolk as well as to himself, and, indeed, to his Country, to Humanity at large, and also to his Church, which ought, in justice, to have actuated — and it is reasonable to believe would have assuredly actuated — a disclosure of the truth respecting the facts of the revelation.
But I hold that the nine conspirators told nothing as to the origin of this Letter of Letters, because they had none of them, anything to tell.
Moreover, I suggest that what Archbishop Usher[139][A] meant when he is reported to have divers times said, “that if Papists knew what he knew, the blame of the Gunpowder Treason would not lie on them,”[140][B] was this: —
[A] Protestant Archbishop of Armagh.
[B] Such a secret as the answer to the problem “Who revealed the Gunpowder Plot?” was a positive burden for Humanity, whereof it should have been, in justice, relieved. For it tends to demonstrate the existence of a realm of actualities having relations to man, but the workings of the causes, processes, and consequences of which realm are invisible to mortal sight; in other words, of the contact and intersection of two circles or spheres, whereof one is bounded by the finite, the other by the infinite. Now, in the case of strong-minded and intelligent Catholics, the weight of this fact would have almost inevitably impelled to an avowal of the fact of revelation had not the omnipotence of the impossible stayed and restrained. Hence, the absence of avowal demonstrates, with moral certitude, the absence of ability to avow. And this latter, with moral certitude, proves my point, namely, that one of the four slain divulged the Plot.
That it was “the Papist Doctrine” of the non-binding force of a secret, unlawful oath that (Deo juvante) had been primarily the joint-efficient cause of the spinning
right round on its axis of the hell-begotten Gunpowder Plot.
It is plain that King James’s Government[A] were mysteriously stayed and restrained in their legislative and administrative action after the discovery of the diabolically atrocious Gunpowder Treason Plot.