The Reverend Mister Dimmesdale

The reverend mister dimesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it indeed in great part by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life. There were men too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his. And endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron or granite understanding which, duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious and unamiable variety of clerical species.