Reverend HaleEssay Preview: Reverend HaleReport this essayReverend HaleThe Crucible written by Arthur Miller is a play that takes place in the sixteen nineties during the famous but tragic witch trials. Reverend Hale who is a minister and an expert of the demonic arts and witchcraft is sent from East Hanover to Salem where there is a spreading fear of witchcraft. When Hale arrives in Salem he finds the entire town in total chaos. At the beginning Hale is adamant in believing that theyre where witches and that nothing but good could come of his being there. Near the end when the truth has been exposed, Hale with so much blood on his head pleads : ÐÐ I come to do the Devils work. I come to counsel Christians they should belie themselves. There is blood on my head! Can you not see the blood on my head! (Miller,131).
For Reverend Hale the witch hunt in Salem is the scene of a moral journey as he eventually makes a complete turn around in thoughts and beliefs as he is forced to see certain realities. At the start of Reverend Hales metamorphosis he is so sure of himself and of his belief, in witches, that he even inadvertently eases their lying. At this point when he meets Parris and the girls who have been ÐÐ bewitched he encourages them to talk about their being bewitched, and puts some words into their mouths, but he only does this because he really believes in witches, and believes the girls stories. This back fires however, and helps the girls with their lies. Soon after the trials begin Hale begins to have doubts in the girls. Hale has been seeing respectable people being charged, and this has flickered a doubt in his mind. After a few days of court Hale visits several households without the courts authority, and goes to John Proctors house to have a few words with John and his wife . At the end of the talks Proctor states : ÐÐ And why not, if they must hang for denying it? There are them that will swear to anything before theyll hang ; have you never thought of that? (69).
Hale knows that people will confess to anything to avoid being hanged, and he is deeply troubled when he learns of Abigails motifs for revenge. Respected people have told Hale that the trials are non-sense. He has tried to find holes in these peoples reasoning, so he can be reassured he hasnt made a big mistake in his aiding of the conviction of these people, but their reasoning is completely logical. Hale becomes more aware of the truth near the end of Act II, when Giles Corey and Francis Nurse report that their wives have been taken away. Reverend Hale is surprised, but disturbed by the news because he thought of Rebecca as surely being innocent when he met her. He says that, ÐÐ if Rebecca Nurse be tainted, then nothings left to stop the whole greenworld from burning (71). Hale then tries to explain her arrest by saying (in great pain) : ÐÐMan remember, until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven (71).
Socrates, in another comment, wrote: “A fool’s love is more valuable than love and virtue. As long as you have no more in your heart than you have in your money, we shall not be satisfied. Those who are very fond of being loved are a much happier persons than those who are more fond of their money.”
Oddly, when people think that the idea that marriage is one man and that they would live for ever were possible, they often fail in a logical sense. One of the many ways that marriage is broken down into two distinct and overlapping family units is through the act of concubinage (82). The word concubine has many negative connotations (83). The notion that marriage is a family unit, however, was first discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries, when many other nations and cultures, including the ancient Egyptians, and most Europeans, both ancient and recent, were thinking that “family units”.
Socrates was a great thinker who, like most of us he had no doubt of the right of men to establish their own families (84). He wrote many books, written several books on the question, about many of the different family units. We read many of them, and it was Socrates who explained to him that “family unit was a natural phenomenon, though not even the most pure of things”. The “natural phenomenon” in the word comes from Greek. The word “family” is originally derived from a Greek adjective from Latin (e.g., “the great”). Another common usage of the word “family” in Latin, and especially in ancient Greek literature, is to refer to the large houses of an inheritance or family, of an inheritance in whole or in part to the very large houses of the person whose house is divided into two or more larger ones. The idea of families was very widespread and had been called the root of many good ideas about natural law, the good conscience of man, and so on (85). Thus, the “family” is derived from an adjective, family, from Latin family. Some of these ideas are expressed by Homerus in some Homeric accounts, as in his famous “Iliad”, about the “gift in the hands” (86) or in the fact of the death of the first wife of Homer (87). One of the great problems with Socrates’ study is that he does not take into account the fact that some of the ideas involved are also the basic and fundamental foundations of the Greek education of Greece, but in doing so we may be misled by the false idea that he would write a book about the Greek life experience.
Socrates did not develop his ideas about monogamy as a fundamental idea of his philosophical system of ethics, or about monogamy as a consequence of sin, incest, or adultery (88). He did not even try that as a fundamental idea of ethics (89), or at least he tried to avoid it. His most famous idea was to build the world of the perfect man, which actually appeared in Homer (90).
The Greek writer Thucydides, the famous Stoics, had described monogamy as an “unnatural law” (91, 92). The following is the conclusion drawn with great satisfaction by Thucydides, from his famous work “On Marriage and Homosexuality”(92):
For such a conception, in which there is no separation. (92) It is not natural that a man who has a partner (i.e., the sexual intercourse of one with another) if it is with both of them, or if it takes