The Holy Ghost doesn't forgive because the Holy Ghost is within you. The Holy Ghost is you: your very You. So if, in your conceit of your ego, you make a break in your own YOU, in your own integrity, how can you be forgiven? You might as well make a rip in your own bowels. You know if you rip your own bowels they will go rotten and you will go rotten. And there's an end of you: in the body.
The same if you make a breach with your own Holy Ghost. You go soul-rotten. Like the Pearls.
These dear Pearls, they do anything they like, and remain pure. Oh, purity!
But they can't stop themselves from going rotten inside. Rotten Pearls, fair outside. Their souls smell, because their souls are putrefying inside them.
The sin against the Holy Ghost.
And gradually, from within outwards, they rot. Some form of dementia. A thing disintegrating. A decomposing psyche. Dementia.
Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius.
Watch these Pearls, these Pearls of modern women. Particularly American women. Battening on love. And fluttering in the first bat-like throes of dementia.
You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.
Hawthorne's other books are nothing compared to The Scarlet Letter.