Chapter 20: The Minister in a Maze

-Reverend Dimmesdale returned to the town as a new person with a new perception on life. Hester’s plan is finalized. They will take a ship to England in four days. Dimmesdale is excited about this because he has time to preach his Election Sermon.

-Although he was not gone for long everything appears differently to him.
~“This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated on his consciousness like the laps of years” (195).

-“At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse” (195).

-Dimmesdale questions why he is being haunted and tempted. In doing so, old Mistress Hibbins approaches him and invites him to the forest. She believes he is a follower of the devil and admires him for keeping it a secret.
~“Well, well, we must needs talk thus in the daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk together!” (199)
~“Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself, with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly” (199.)
~“And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but show his sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits” (199).

-Dimmesdale goes back to his home where Chillingworth offers him medicine. Dimmesdale does not accept it and goes straight to writing his election speech.
~“The physician knew then, that, in the minister’s regard, he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest enemy” (201).