ethan brand

Three men from town arrive to see Brand. All three men - a stage-agent, a lawyer, and a doctor – honorable earlier in their lives, were now merely drunkards. The three greeted Brand and invited him to drink from a black bottle, in which they claimed he would find something better than the Unpardonable Sin. Brand, who had achieved a “high state of enthusiasm” after his years of solitary meditation, could not bear to be around such “low and vulgar modes of thought”. In their company, he began to worry whether he had indeed found the Unpardonable Sin.