Ethan Brand is a former lime-burner who left Mount Greylock and the village 18 years before to find the “Unpardonable Sin.” He is also a subject of curiosity and terror for Bartram, Joe, and the villagers. He returns and tells Bartram and the villagers that he has found the Unpardonable Sin in his own heart. He reveals that the Unpardonable Sin, of which he is guilty, is an intellectualism that had alienated him from the fellowship of other people and from reverence for God. It is an intellectualism that led him to perform a cruel psychological experiment on Humphrey’s daughter Esther, which he fears might have “annihilated her soul” and which he is convinced has damned him eternally to hell (Paragraph 49). He feels an extreme guilt for his actions, to the extent that he does not believe himself worthy of redemption and willingly throws himself into the lime-kiln to confront his fate in hell.

Despite the horror of his situation, Ethan Brand has soberly accepted his fate and readily awaits his punishment. He sees his punishment as a just, correct, and, ultimately, natural consequence of his misdeeds and believes that his physical and spiritual deaths will complete his, and God’s, work.