Sin in The Minister’s Black Veil and The Scarlet Letter In some way or another, our past, the traditions passed down through our ancestors, and the values instilled in us by our parents, affect our own minds and perceptions of the world. We may choose to pass on these traditions or reject them for new ones, but the past always influences us. Nathaniel Hawthorne was no different than the rest of us. He writes in the first chapter of The Scarlet Letter, “But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancesttor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present in my boyish imagination, as far back as I can