So let me make haste to take my shame upon me!’” Then he turns to the crowd and cries out his guilt: “‘People of New England! Ye, that have loved me!- ye, that have deemed me holy! Behold me here, the one sinner of the world! At last! At last! I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I should have stood; here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me, at this dreadful moment, from groveling down upon my face.’” (231) Ripping his minister’s robes from his chest, he shouts to bears the sign of his guilt, falls down upon the scaffold and dies. The crowd breaks out in a “strange, deep voice of awe and wonder.”
The scaffold unifies all the characters: Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth as they meet together in the three scaffold scenes. It is a stage, where Hester and Dimmesdale reveal their feelings as they struggle with their sin. The moral of the romance is shown by Dimmesdale’s deeds and the way he struggle with his sin. “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be interfered!”(236) This quotation tells more about people’s souls than about their actions. The secret about his sin was killing him. If he had revealed the truth in the very beginning on the scaffold with Hester, his life would probably be more valuable and he wouldn’t suffer as much as he did.