How does Hawthorne characterize Reverend John Wilson? Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"

Just as he
uses true historical figures asin his story ","writes into his narrative of
"" the "stern divine" , a minister who came to America in 1630.  A strong
figure of Puritan intolerance he appears in Chapter III in the first scaffold scene. However,
Hawthorne describes him in such a way as to suggest his Puritanical ineffectiveness and punitive
nature:

withal a man of kind and genial spirit....an
attribute [that] was...a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him....There he stood,
with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap; while his gray eyes, accustomed to the
shaded light of his study , were winking, like those of 's infant, in the unadulterated
sunshine.  He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of
sermons; and no more right than of those portraits would have to step forth, as he now did and
meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.

Alluding to the judges of the witchcraft trials, Hawthorne suggests the Puritanical
sanctimony in the Reverend Wilson who admits that he overrides the concern of Mr.that it is a
wrongdoing to question her in "such broad daylight, and in the presence of so great a
multitude." But, Mr. Wilson, continues, he has explained to Dimmesdale that the wrongdoing
is in the "commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth."  He, then, bids
the Reverend Dimmesdale to step forward and question Hester.  But, despite his pleas, Hester
refuses.  Mr. Wilson cries "more harshly than before,"

Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy!

The Reverend Mr. Wilson appears again at the mansion ofand
questions Hester about her right to raise the little girl.  When he askswho "made
thee," Pearl astonishes him by replying that she was plucked from the wild rose bush by the
prison.  After this response, the Reverend Wilson feels the child should be taken from Hester,
believing the mother wishes to "make a mountain bank of this child."

Whensuggests that they guess the father of the child, the "good Mr. Wilson"
suggests that it would be "sinful" to pursue the matter; better to "pray and fast
upon it."  Mr. Wilson does not appear again until the second scaffold scene in Chapter XII,
and then he does perceive Mr. Dimmesdale through the darkness even though Dimmesdale barely
restrains himself from speaking:

The venerable Father
Wilson continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy parthway before his
feet.

And, finally, in the third scaffold scene,
"the venerable John Wison,...stepped forward hastily to offer his support" to Reverend
Dimmesdale, but the young minister "repelled the old man's arm."

Symbolic of Puritanism and its ineffectiveness in assuaging the soul, the Reverend Mr.
Wilson is part of the tableaux that present the punitive character of Puritanism and its
ineffectiveness.