Loss of Faith in Young Goodman Brown In the Bible, God commands Moses to ascend Mount Sinai to receive divine instruction. When he returns, his people, the Israelites, have gone mad. They have forgotten Moses and they have forgotten their God. They form their own god, a golden calf, and build an altar. They even had a feast for the golden calf. “Then they sat down to eat and drink, and sat down to make merry” (Exodus 32:6). Moses then came down from the mountain and became so angry that he smashed the tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. The Israelites lost their faith because they could not see the God they were worshiping, so they forgot him and began worshiping a false idol. The Israelites are not very different from modern man. In his short story "Young Goodman Brown", Hawthorne shows why man loses faith. Man loses faith due to pride, weakness and wrong values. Pride makes man lose faith. Often man tries to manage situations alone. Try to deal with evil on your own. In "Young Goodman Brown," the title character goes mad and confronts evil: "Come witch, come wizard, come Indian meeting, come devil himself! And here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fears you!" (Hawthorne 324). Goodman Brown feels it will be the end of sin. He assumes that he is strong enough to conquer everything on his own. Pride also prevents man from realizing his own imperfections. When wandering in the desert, young Goodman Brown says, “A wonder, indeed, that Goody Cloyse should be so far out in the desert at nightfall” (Hawthorne 320). The desert symbolizes any sinful place. Young Goodman Brown fails to understand that the only reason... middle of paper...ke Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abandoned the beliefs of post-war America. Many of these thinkers moved to Paris and tried to find meaning in their meaningless lives. They threw wild parties, "drank excessively and had scandalous love affairs (Kaiser)." They gained prominence in the 20th century because of their spiritual alienation. The loss of faith can bring fame and fortune, as it did for the lost generation, but with this loss came an inevitable void. Works Cited Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." Perrine's literature: structure, sound and meaning. Ed. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Harcourt College Publishers: Fort Worth, 2002. 316-328.Kaiser, Nancy. "The Lost Generation." University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. October 29, 2001. < http://ils.unc.edu/~kaisn/pathfind.html>