Young Goodman Brown

"Young Goodman Brown"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now ye are undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind." (Hawthorne 546)

I find this quote a little disturbing because it makes it seems as if you cannot find any happiness in the world. In the first sentence the devil takes away mankinds faith in the fact that there is some sort of good in the world. He is telling the people that now he will tell them the truth, mankind is evil. To call all of mankind "evil" is to say that even in our best intentions there is still some hint of wrong doing. If a person were to think this way about mankind they might never trust someone or even enjoy their presence because a secret evil may always be hiding in the corner. I do not agree with the devil when he says this because I do not want to always be thinking about the bad in people, I want to be able to be aware of the bad but trust in the fact that there is a lot of happiness to be spread in the world.