August 27, 2002 The Sins of the Puritans "In Adam's fall, we sinned all."(Hall, 1)This quote from the New England primer much pertains to Nathaniel Hawthorne's characters in The Scarlet Letter. The Puritans were a people dedicated to improving themselves according to a certain set of principles that were exclusively Puritan. On the personal level, a Puritan would struggle to reach perfection by living out this system of values. If they did not succeed, as in …showed first 75 words of 3013 total…

…showed last 75 words of 3013 total…Company, May 2002          Holly Bible. KJV. American Bible Society, 1999 Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Scarlet Letter". New Riverside Edition. Rita K. Gollin, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 2002                   Kazin, Alfred. "God and the American Writer". New York Vintage Books, 1998 Leites, Edmond. "The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality". Yale University Publishing. Reissued edition, September 1995                   Mohamed, Yasien. "The Christian Doctrine of Original Sin". Ta Ha Publishers Ltd. 1996 http://WWW.thetruereligion.org/origininalsin.html. Thomas Booth, Cathy. "A New Scarlet Letter". Time 11 June 2000: 82