1 | Many, many a poor soul hath given its confidence to me, not only on the deathbed, but while strong in life, and fair in reputation. | |
2 | Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest an unspoken crime? | |
3 | Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery, and wrought out no repentance? | |
4 | This morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong, beneath. | |
5 | If they would serve their fellow-men, let them do it by making manifest the power and reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential self-abasement! |