1;(313). Brown will literally break his faith if he continues on the path of understanding the evils of the human condition. The devil tries to make him see that evil is the apparent nature of his kin and human kind as a whole. Brown doesn’t see clearly because without “faith” all human kind is blind to acts of evil. Goodman Brown’s confidence is shaken when he sees Goody Cloyse, an old woman who taught him his catechism, converse with the devil about the witch’s meeting that she will attend. The devil convinces Brown to go further into the forest because he sees Brown is questioning his beliefs from the shock he just suffered. Brown stops again, he tells the devil “my mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is it any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?”(314). Brown asks this rhetorical question, but in a sense he actually wants someone to make this decision for him. While Brown sits in the forest alone he congratulates himself for choosing his idea of good, and he believes his battle with evil to be over. Deacon Gookin and Brown’s minister ride through the path, and Brown overhears that they’re going to the witch’s meeting. Brown watched them as “they passed on through the forest, where no church had ever been gathered or solitary Christian prayed”(315). Brown has witnessed the people he admires turning away from God and embracing evil, and he finds the power of their example to be undeniable. Brown sits “faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart,” in the forest where the moral wanderings of his strange encounters have taken place (315). Brown gazes at the sky and wonders if there is a heaven and he cries, “with heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the...
