than this? Would not the people start up in their
seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down
out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed!
They heard it all, and did but reverence him the
more. They little guessed what deadly purport
lurked in those self-condemning words. “The
godly youth!” said they among themselves.
“The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern
such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid
spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!”
The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful
hypocrite that he was!—the light in which
his vague confession would be viewed. He had
striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the
avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only
one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without
the momentary relief of being self-deceived.
He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into
the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution
of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the
lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all
things else, he loathed his miserable self!
His inward trouble drove him to practices more in
accordance with the old, corrupted faith of Rome than
with the better light of the church in which he had
been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale’s
secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody
scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan
divine had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing
bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much
the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh.
It was his custom, too, as it has been that of many
other pious Puritans, to fast—not however,
like them, in order to purify the body, and render
it the fitter medium of celestial illumination—but
rigorously, and until his knees trembled beneath him,
as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise,
night after night, sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes
with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his
own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful
light which he could throw upon it. He thus
typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured,
but could not purify himself. In these lengthened
vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed
to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by
a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness
of the chamber, or more vividly and close beside him,
within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd
of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the
pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now
a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily,
as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose.
Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded
father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother turning
her face away as she passed by. Ghost of a mother—thinnest
fantasy of a mother—methinks she might
yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son!
And now, through the chamber which these spectral
thoughts had made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne
leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and
pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter
on her bosom, and then at the clergyman’s own
breast.
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