Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown - Goody Cloyse and Catechetical Ministry :: Young Goodman Brown YGB

Young Good while Brown, Goody Cloyse and Catechetical Ministry This essay intends to compare the authors disparaging slur of Goody Cloyse, Puritan catechism teacher, Deacon Gookin and the minister both of whom are catechists - in Young Goodman Brown, with In Support of Catechetical Ministry - A Statement of the U.S. Catholic Bishops from June of 2000. The diverge of Puritan religion, culture and education is a common topic in Nathaniel Hawthornes get goings. Growing up, Hawthorne could not escape the influence of Puritan society, not only from residing with his fathers devout Puritan family as a child but also due to his study of his own family history. The low of his roots, William Hathorne, is described in Hawthornes The Custom House as arriving with the Massachusetts mouth small town in 1630 with his Bible and his sword (26). A further joining can also be seen in his more not suitable ancestor buns Hathorne, who exemplified the level of zealousness in Puritanism with his role as persecutor in the Salem beguile Trials. The study of his own family from the establishment of the Bay Colony to the Second Great Awakening of his own time parallels the issues brought forth in Young Goodman Brown. In looking into the history of early Puritan society, Hawthorne is able to discuss the merits and consequences of such zeal, especially the Puritan Catechism of John Cotton, and the repercussions of The Salem Witch trials. Hawthorne sets Young Goodman Brown into a context of Puritan rigidity and self-doubt to allow his contemporary readers to see the consequences of such a system of belief. Hawthornes tale places the newly wed Puritan Brown in a situation, where he has agreed with an evil character to participate in a coven, a witchs ceremony, a devil-worship liturgy. The experience he has at this liturgy easily translates into the dream allegory of Hawthornes work and allows the author to use Puritan doctrine and the history of Salem to signal the merits and consequences of the belief in mans total moral depravity. As Benjamin Franklin V states in Goodman Brown and the Puritan Catechism, Hawthorne used John Cottons Milk for Babes as the education source of Goodman Brown. It was the Puritan belief that man must be instructed to realize his own depravity, and therefore at childishness the education began. The child was taught that he wasconceived in sin, and born in abhorrence (70).