In the novel The Scarlet Letterby Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is one character who illustrates the importance of the moral of being true to the world?...

At the time of
's publication an influential critic of the time referred to Hawthorne's
novel as 

a psychological romance . . . a study of
character in which the human heart is anatomized, carefully, elaborately, and with striking
poetic and dramatic power.

Furthermore, it is from this
analysis of the human heart thatbuilds his moral exhortation for people to "Be
True!"  For, each of the mainsupport this moral--, who by living openly with her sin and by
being honest and humble makes retribution for her sin of adultery in a stringent world by
consenting to it; , who hides his secret sin so deeply that he deludes both himself and others
while leaving himself wounded internally and mortally vulnerable in his iniquity to the
charlatan Chillingworth; and, finally, Roger Chillingwoth, who commits the blackest sin of all
as he violates the sacredness of the human heart, thus causing his own decay.

As the most negative example of the value of the moral lesson to be true in life, ,
therefore, illustrates the utter destructiveness of both secret sin and great malice. In ,
Hester's husband begins his deception and vows revenge upon Hester's lover who has disgraced
both her and him.  When Hester asks him, "....Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will
prove the ruin of my soul?" Chillingworth replies, "Not thy soul....No, not
thine!"  Ironically, however, it is his own heart that becomes the blackest, and his soul
that realizes the most ruin as he becomes, in his very words, "a fiend" as he pries
into the innermost feelings of the unsuspecting Dimmesdale--"to burrow into the clergyman's
intimacy, and plot against his soul":

He groped along
as stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber
where a man lies only half asleep,--or,it may be, broad awake,--with purpose to steal the very
treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye. (ch. 10)

This "Black Man," as littlecalls him, seeks to deceive Rev. Dimmesdale into
thinking that he wishes to cure the minister, urging him to "lay open...the wound or
trouble in your soul!" After the minister becomes disturbed and departs from him,
Chillingworth vows to uncover the reason for Dimmesdale's passion in their discussion of his
illness:

"...A strange sympathy betwixt soul and
body!  Were it only for art's sake, I must search this matter to the bottom."

Then, after Dimmesdale falls asleep, the fiend Chillingworth
deceptively steals into the minister's room, pushing aside the vestment and perceives the
manifestation of Dimmesdale's personal agonies:

Had a man
seen old Roger Chillingworth...he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when
a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.

Having stolen the secrets of Dimmesdale's heart, Chillingworth now becomes a
"chief actor in the minister's interior world." It is at this point that Chillingworth
has "transformed himself into a devil...."  Certainly, he undertakes the "devil's
office" of torturing Dimmesdale's heart and adding fuel to the "fiery tortures"
of this heart.  For, no man could be more false to another.  And, by his own admission to
Hester, in his evil deception, he holds the minister the prisoner of his own heart.  However, by
not being true, Chillingworth suffers the same punishment of falsehood that Dimmesdale does:
death of the spirit.