n. Though, a holy man, and a man who is very much revered by the people of Salem, he commits a sin in which goes totally against the words he preaches. His choice to keep his black secret locked deep within his soul resulted in the deterioration of his health. Each time he would deliver a sermon to his congregation, he grew weaker and more ashamed of what he did. In doing so, he chose his congregation over his health, to remain the most respected man in the community. A choice that caused him to suffer much more than Hester and Chillingworth ever did. Dimmesdale was morally wrong in his act, but in keeping this enormous secret from the community, the town of Salem was better off. This was the moral thing to do for the good of the community. His soul became blackened by his secret as well as from Roger Chillingworth’s evil torture. Chillingworth is probably the most mysterious character in the book because of how he changes as the book goes on. He went from a kind and gentleman, to an evil man who many thought worked with “Black Magic.” It was in fact the largest sin of all in Chillingworth’s mission to inflict torturous revenge on the reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. In a quote from Dimmesdale in the book he says “That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart.” In doing these terrible acts of evil it is stated throughout the book that Chillingworth was growing uglier and uglier as time went on. This was a sin that he himself was affected by his devilish acts. In the beginning Roger Chillingworth seems to not be in the wrong, though in the end he becomes the most immoral one of them all. When you think about this book, its about morals, sin, and how morally they handle their sin. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter it is the criminal that seems good and the good that seems criminal. With Hester accepting her sin she is ...
