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, such as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gambles to try to make up for the sin of his ancestors. Hawthorne’s writing skills can be concluded as follows: Firstly, all his life, Hawthorne seems to be indulged in his sense of sin and evil in life. Reading his books, one cannot but be overwhelmed by the black vision which these books reveal. Evil exists in the human heart all the time. For instance, in the short story, “ Earth’s Holocaust,” we can find that, though all symbols of tradition and the past have been burned in the bonfire of the life of the New World, the source of evil---the human heart, remains intact. Everyone possesses some evil secret as tales like “ Young Goodman Brown” set out to prove. Everyone tries to cover up its innermost evil in the way the minister Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter tries to pretend how pure and pious he is. Evil seems to be man’s birthmark. This point of view is just as what The Bible describes people’s original sin. Secondly, to Hawthorne, sin will surely get punished, one way or another. As a matter of fact, he was said to be always troubled by the thought that the decline of his family’s fortune had something to do with the sins of his Puritan ancestors. Hawthorne deeply believes that “the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones”(The House of the Seven Gambles). It is also interesting to note that Hawthorne believes that evil educates. What Hawthorne seems to prove is that man can get experience from the crime which brings about the disaster. In short, to tell the truth and yet not to offend, that is all Hawthorne tries to achieve in his works. “ Chapter Tw Depravity---the Origin of the Scarlet Letter The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston, which is under Puritan command. A young woman, named Hester Prynne, is sent ahead to America by her husband---an old and ugly scholar. However, for many years, he himself doesn’t arrive. Obviously, it is possible that he has been lost in the sea. While waiting for her husband, Hester and a young local minister called Arthur Dimmesdale fall in love with each other. They commit adultery secretly. Because of Hester’s Pregnancy, the secret is finally discovered. According to The Bible, everyone is sinful. That is the opinion of the original sin: when God creates the world, He first creates a man called Adam and then a woman called Eve. They live happily in the Garden of Eden. God tells them that they can eat every kind of fruit in the garden except those on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Instigated by the serpent, the two can not control their curiosity and violates God’s order and eat the fruits from that particular tree. That enrages God. From that time on, they become sinful and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. However, sin doesn’t stop. It is passed from generation to generation by reproduction of Adam and Eve. All successive generations are their descendants and therefore inherit their sin. So at the time one is born, he/she bears evil and has the root of committing crime. According to the principle of the original sin, Hester Prynne is not an exception. She is also the offspring of Adam and Eve. The inside of her flows their bloods and she of course inherits their original sin. Thus she is a sinner from the beginning of her life. Are there any other standards to judge whether a person is sinful?The answer is positive. The criterion should not be the common custom. Instead, it should be t