The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set
her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where
other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had
been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and they had made her
strong, but taught her much amiss.
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an
experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally
received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so
fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them. But this
had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and
minuteness, not his acts--for those it was easy to arrange--but
each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of
the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was
only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and
even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order
inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the
fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer
within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
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