All 4 Uses of
righteous
in
The Scarlet Letter
- A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine!†
Chpt 2
- Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall, and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea, they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her.†
Chpt 3
- Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care—to be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parents thither!†
Chpt 8
- According to these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man's own righteousness.†
Chpt 24 *
Definition:
-
(righteous as in: a righteous cause) morally correct; or morally justified
or:
acting or feeling morally superior -- especially when it isn't true (this meaning is more typically seen as a compound word beginning with "self-")