Hawthorn imbued the beliefs of himself and the values he stood for within "The Custom House." It's an important piece of literature because of the stance it takes on morality of the era in which it was written. Hawthorne had firm belief in the purity of innocence, the non-existential good, and the corruption of man. Hawthorne believed their was purity not in man, but nature because of it's grace and beauty. "Nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty that have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay..." Hawthorne calls humans out as the broken people we are and that we can only be fixed by natural grace. Puritanism held the belief that everyone was broken, torn, lost and drowning in their sin doomed to a …show more content…
Nature was what they viewed as God's creation and therefore what could help purge them of their faults and their brokenness. Ultimately the only way they believe salvation could be attained was through natural repentance with God. What constitutes someone as a good person is impossible. Hawthorne believed that one could strive close to it and pursue it in hopes of attaining it one day. "His spirit could never I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it must at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an accurate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give out or fall." Hawthorne describes how a good man would stand up to the world even against obstacles it may present him with. This is important to the piece because this is what he justifies to be good and will be referring to when calls someone good. This ties into the underlying factor of puritan faith that needed to stand strong agains the most malicious storms that life threw at them. The one belief that is so easily intertwined with the others was corruption of man, ".. has in tis respect,