Defender of the Faith

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The power that the devil has over Goodman Brown was not enough to break him from his faith and to fall into evil and darkness. There are some people who fell to the manipulation and deceit of the devil like the characters who were going to the meeting place for their ritual. These characters consist of the town minister, Deacon Gookin, and Goody Cloyse who taught Goodman Brown his catechism, which was the initial schooling of the Bible in the Christian religion. Goodman Brown’s faith weakens very much when he sees these people committing such acts of evil in the black mass because they were all involved in the church and were very faithful individuals who just lost their faith by collapsing to the devil’s devious promises and actions. When he finds his wife’s pink ribbon in the forrest, Goodman Brown’s faith weakened even further. This is the point where he crumbles into the earth and says; “My Faith is gone! Cried he, after one stupefied moment. ‘There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name. Come devil! For to thee is this world given’” (625). Since he cannot find his wife, he no longer has faith that the world is good and loses his faith almost entirely. When he comes out of the forrest, his life is changed and sees everything in his environment as evil, sinful, and hypocritical. This story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts that the human race can, does, and will break away from their faith if an event is dark and cruel enough to completely change the way people view the world and the people who exist in it.

Hawthorne uses this journey through the forrest and the black mass to show us all the evil and darkness there is in the world. Goodman Brown has a sense of moral faith but loses it when he finds that everyone around him has lost their faith due to the evil that encompass them and the world around them. Goodman Brown looks at people and the world and sees all the evil and sin and judges these people and finds them to be hypocrites as sinners when he is the one being a hypocrite because he looks at others and judges them for sinning without looking at his own sins he has committed. Faith is a very easy thing to manipulate because people make mistakes. Humans are drawn to things that interest them which ends up causing them to sin and in turn we repent for our sins, but every human has committed sin in some way during their lifetime. What Hawthorne wanted us to take away from this story was that we should all hate our sins, but love our sinners. Goodman Brown completely loses all sight of this by the end of the story, and dies as a gloomy and misguided individual.

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