words, and let alone God. If a Christian believes God’s words completely, God will always accomplish them. In regard to God, He must keep His words and His deeds the same all the time. Whatever He has said, He will let it become true. “Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?”(Numbers 23, 19)
Then what is faith? Faith is just the firm belief that all these God has said are true. When God says that something is in existence, although you has not see it personally, faith would make you feel that it really exists. If God says that He will bless you, you would believe by your faith that you are already blessed. When God says that something is going to happen or that He will accomplish something for you, you would believe in Him or His words if you are faithful. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”(Hebrews11,1) Faith always make people to believe God and His omnipotence to fulfill His promises only through His words.
Therefore, although Hester Prynne has profaned God and is suffering, she could be saved if she has faith in God. Faith is the only way that can offer her salvation. Generally speaking, Hester Prynne is a Christian rebel. She’s severely tortured by the church :sent to jail, exposed publicly ,forced to wear the scarlet letter “A ”,etc .At the very beginning ,she wants to atone for her crime wholeheartedly .However, increasingly severe persecution and endless humiliation shake her religious believing and diminish her religious faith gradually. All these make her rebel. “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her flee. 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”(Chapter 18) Therefore she has courage to incite Dimmesdale to escape with her to a place to be free.
However, after delving deeply in this novel and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characteristics, I have another conclusion: Hester Prynne is never a Christian rebel. Instead, she always clings herself to God. And her final death is not an

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]  下一页