Reverend Hale is the character I view as having the most drastic and noticeable character development. He started as someone who thought his actions of witch hunting and prosecution were righteous and the will of God. He spends a lot of his first appearances trying to get information out of Abigail about Betty and Ruth, and a confession out of Tituba, feeling vindicated when she willingly gives up herself and other women. His personality gets more harsh after this, the hunt accelerating when Abigail gets more of the girls to accuse townspeople of witchcraft.
His reasoning starts to falter after he meets the Proctors and witnesses Cheever come to their house and inform Elizabeth that Abigail had accused her. He knows Elizabeth is a good woman and tries to reason with Cheever about how Mary admitted to putting a needle in the poppet, but he isn’t listened to and begins to question the morality of the witch trials. Hale listens to the Proctors’ and starts to see the flaws in the girls' stories, vowing to help John prove Elizabeth’s innocence and get her out of jail.
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She blatantly admits to pretending about seeing spirits, along with all the other girls, but Abigail turns on Mary and accuses her of sending her spirit out which leads the judge to be even more suspicious. The situation escalates until Mary turns on John and screams that he’d come to her to make her sign the Devil's black book. That was the final straw for Hale, as he saw John as one of the only sane people left in town, and he denounced the church before