The Scarlet Letter

"Ay--how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?" interrupted the

Governor. "Make that plain, I pray you!"

"It must be even so," resumed the minister. "For, if we deem it

otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the

creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and

made of no account the distinction between unhallowed lust and

holy love? This child of its father's guilt and its mother's

shame has come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon

her heart, who pleads so earnestly and with such bitterness of

spirit the right to keep her. It was meant for a blessing--for

the one blessing of her life! It was meant, doubtless, the

mother herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture

to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an

ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath she

not expressed this thought in the garb of the poor child, so

forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?"

"Well said again!" cried good Mr. Wilson. "I feared the woman

had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!"

"Oh, not so!--not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale. "She

recognises, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath

wrought in the existence of that child. And may she feel,

too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was

meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive,

and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan

might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for

this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a

being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care--to

be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every

moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the

Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven,

the child also will bring its parents thither! Herein is the

sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester

Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let

us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"

"You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness," said old

Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him.

"And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath

spoken," added the Rev. Mr. Wilson.

"What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he not

pleaded well for the poor woman?"

"Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate; "and hath adduced

such arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now

stands; so long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal

in the woman. Care must be had nevertheless, to put the child to

due and stated examination in the catechism, at thy hands or

Master Dimmesdale's. Moreover, at a proper season, the

tithing-men must take heed that she go both to school and to

meeting."