Arthur Dimmesdale commits the greatest sin. Throughout the novel, he never confesses to being Pearl’s father, and he acts like a hypocrite. He is the pastor in the town of Boston, Massachusetts, but yet he has committed the sin of adultery by having a child out of wedlock with a married woman. His sin is actually a combination of many sins, but it all starts when he commits adultery with Hester Prynne.
Dimmesdale is Pearl’s father, but he never will confess this to the public. In the beginning of the novel when Hester Prynne is standing on the scaffold, she is enduring her punishment alone for their sin. Because Dimmesdale is the town’s minister, he asks Hester to confess the name of the father of her child. She says, “I will not speak!” He even says that Hester should confess the father of her child’s name because the father will only “add hypocrisy to sin” if he does not confess. He is trying to get Hester to admit to his sin, so that he will not have to do this. Because he will never confess, the town believes he is a saint because they refer to him as “the saint on earth.”
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He makes the townspeople believe that Hester’s sin is horrific, and he even makes examples out of her sin during his sermons. But it says, “The minister well knew [the] remorseful hypocrite that he was.” He often attempted to confess his sins during his sermons, but he always confessed them vaguely. Because he could never confess his sins, he allows himself to slowly die. This is also a sin against God because the Bible says, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” In response to this, it says, “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him.” He slowly allows his dying body to be the result of his internal grief. If he would have only confessed when the sin occurred, he would have saved himself from a slow, internally painful death and saved himself from committing even more