1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Minister's Black Veil," in Twice-Told Tales , 39. Further references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text.

2. For a comprehensive explication of the tale's eighteenth-century historical context, see Michael Colacurcio, The Province of Piety , chap. 6, "The True Sight of Sin."

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, journal entry for 1842, in The American Notebooks . The entry is also quoted by Henry G. Fairbanks, The Lasting Loneliness of Nathaniel Hawthorne , 54.

4. Brownson to Hecker, November 8, 1843, in The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence , 76 (hereafter referred to as Correspondence ).

5. "The Port-Royalists." Edinburgh Review (July 1841), as quoted in William Ellery Channing, " The Church ," 57.

6. Andrew Delbanco, William Ellery Channing , 73.

7. Calvin Colton [pseud.], Protestant Jesuitism , 23, 17.

8. Hecker to Brownson, July 23, 1845, in Correspondence , 127-28.

9. Hecker, Aspirations of Nature , 296.

10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Stephen E. Whicher, 162.

11. "Balmes on Civilization," Christian Examiner 52 (1852): 187.

12. "A Roland for an Oliver," Christian Examiner 7 (1830): 240.

13. "Sphere of Human Influence," Christian Examiner 45 (1848): 426.

14. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin , 218.

15. Lydia Maria Child, The Mother's Book , 4.

16. Horace Bushnell, "Unconscious Influence," The American National Preacher 20 (1846). Further references to this sermon are given parenthetically in the text.

17. For a useful exposition of Bushnell's linguistic theories, see James O. Duke, Horace Bushnell . Contrast Bushnell's insistence on the metaphoric character of scriptural language to the Catholic convert Peter H. Burnett's view of Christ: "When He used language as a medium of communication, He did not rob it of its established character" ( The Path Which Led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church , 115).

18. Hawthorne's projected image of unmediated communion in the afterlife, expressed in an early letter to Sophia ("In Heaven, I am very sure, there will be no occasion for words;—our minds will enter into each other, and silently possess themselves of their natural riches") was to Bushnell already a reality, if a slightly less benign one (Hawthorne to Sophia Hawthorne, April 6, 1840, in Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1839-1841 , 173).

19. Edward Beecher, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture , 378.

20. Emerson, "Behavior," in The Complete Works , 6:178-79.

21. "Female Convents," Christian Examiner 19 (1836): 82. The St. Leopold Foundation was an Austro-Hungarian missionary society founded in 1829 to further the growth of the Catholic church in America. Morse's Foreign Conspiracy was directed against the alleged conspiracies of the foundation. See Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 121-23; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance .