Nathanial Hawthorne wanted us to know from the title that his short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” was a parable, which is a short simple story told to teach a moral or religious lesson. The story is about both religion and morality, and how the deeply religious can be hypocritical, quick to cast judgment but unwilling to be honest about their own sinfulness. Hawthorne has been described as both a “renegade puritan” and a liberal transcendentalist (Morseburger 454). Although the Bible is clear that all of humanity are sinners, the Puritans believed “anything less than absolute perfection was Continue reading...