The Moral Man: the Crucible

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“The Moral Man”: Crucible Essay
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was a Protestant theologian who was known as the moral man in an immortal society. Niebuhr is most famous for his efforts to relate Christianity to the politics and diplomacy of today. Not only do his words relay indefinitely into that of the lives of the characters in the crucible, but his own personal beliefs make him an avid participant in a witch hunt being the main focus of Miller’s book. And so the question comes about: What does it truly mean to be a moral man? It could easily be described as someone who is willing to take serious risks to defend their beliefs, but that is too shallow of an answer, barely scathing the surface. To answer this question, I was forced to dig deeper inside of myself.
Analyzing my own life, in comparison to that of John proctor and Rebecca Nurse, characters from Miller’s book the crucible, I’d like to think that id risk my own life, even sign myself to death in the name of my beliefs. Reflecting over witch hunts of their own accord which have taken place in my life, I realize that I am not as strong willed a person in comparison as I’d like to be, or how I had initially seen myself. I personally have experienced a witch hunt, which had gradually stalked its way into my life as the courts had done to idealized characters Taul, 2 such as Rebecca and Proctor. In my situation, I had done something with “friends” that I could not take back, and the truth, receiving punishment in itself, was nothing compared to the punishment my mind would torture me with upon the utterance of a lie. I could easily make the reference to the character Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter. His truth would hurt

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