Welcome back by friend. It's good to sit with you again. I always feel that quiet moment when someone returns---not rushing, not demanding answers, just willing to listen. Last time, we spent our time with a solitary thinker, someone who trusted his own conscience even when the world around him offered no shelter for it. That kind of courage lingers. It stays in the room after the story ends.
Tonight, I want to walk with you into a different kind of moment. Not the birth of conviction, but what comes after it falters. After certainty cracks. After a person realizes that sincerity and goodness are not always the same thing.
This is a story about a man who once held authority---and later chose to stand beneath it. A man who learned, painfully, that doing wrong can feel righteous at the time. And who decided that realizing this truth could not remain private.
I don't offer this story for comfort. I offer it because it asks something honest of us.
Stay with me.
I remember the cold in that meetinghouse. Not the sharp kind that stings the skin, but the heavy winter cold that settles into wood and stone and refuses to move. The light was thin, filtering through small windows, pale and restrained. People sat close together on hard benches, their breath quiet, their coats pulled tight. This was not a gathering for celebration.
At the front of the church stood Samuel Sewall. He did not speak. That mattered. Another man read aloud instead---words written by Sewall himself. A confession. Carefully composed. Public by intention.
There was no spectacle in it. No raised voice. No tears offered for display. Just a man standing while his own acknowledgment moved through the room, word by word, carried by someone else's breath. The congregation listened. No one interrupted. No one corrected him. The silence was part of the act.
I watched faces as the words landed---some startled, some softened, some guarded. Confession, when it is real, rearranges a room. It asks everyone present to decide whether they believe change is possible, and whether responsibility can be shared rather than hidden.
Every one in that room knew of his "Crime". A judgment he had passed down. What he had done was not a crime against the law, but rather a sin against humanity. But there he was, a man of uncompromising authority and power, making a public confession of his sin. Not asking forgiveness, history would never forgive him. Simply stating clearly in public that he acknowledged his sin.
And I wondered---because I always do in moments like this---what kind of man chooses to be remembered not for his power, but for the moment he laid it down.
Before that winter morning, Samuel Sewall was known as a serious man in a serious place. Boston at the end of the seventeenth century did not reward softness. Survival demanded order. Faith demanded vigilance. And Sewall fit neatly into both. He was educated, devout, respected. A magistrate entrusted with judgment. A husband, a father, a man whose life was shaped by prayer and record-keeping, by the belief that careful attention to one's actions mattered.
He wrote constantly---about his failures, his fears, his obligations. He examined himself in ways that feel almost modern, though the world he inhabited was anything but gentle. He believed that moral life required discipline. That conscience needed tending. That authority, properly exercised, was a form of service.
Years later, that same moral seriousness would lead him to write something remarkable. In 1700, Sewall published a small pamphlet titled The Selling of Joseph. It was a direct, unambiguous condemnation of slavery at a time when such clarity was rare and unwelcome. He did not argue economics. He argued humanity. He named the violence plainly and refused to dress it up as custom or necessity. In doing so, he placed himself at odds with neighbors, merchants, even friends.
This mattered. It tells us something important about the man standing in that church. He was not casual about right and wrong. He was not indifferent to suffering. He believed, deeply, that moral error could not be excused by convenience or tradition.
Which is why what came next would matter so much.
Because when a man like this confesses publicly, it is not because he has just discovered that sin exists. It is because he has discovered that he himself was capable of committing a sin---while believing he was doing good.
In Sewall's world, repentance was not a private feeling. It was not an inward ache meant to be soothed by time or prayer alone. Repentance was something you did---or more precisely, something you allowed to be done to you. It meant stepping out of the shelter of justification and standing where truth could see you clearly.
This mattered because the world he lived in was built on moral confidence. Courts existed to name guilt. Churches existed to name sin. Authority existed to protect order. When those structures functioned, people trusted them. And when they failed, the failure was rarely named as such. It was blamed on chaos, on evil, on those who disturbed the peace.
Sewall came to understand something more unsettling. That wrongdoing does not always announce itself as cruelty. Sometimes it arrives dressed as duty. Sometimes it speaks in the calm language of procedure. Sometimes it feels, in the moment, like faithfulness.
Repentance, then, was not about asking to be forgiven. Forgiveness would have been too easy, too personal. What he chose instead was acknowledgment. A willingness to say---publicly---that he had been wrong, and that his wrongness had harmed others in ways that could not be undone.
This is why his later moral clarity matters so much. His opposition to slavery was not the posture of a man eager to prove his goodness. It was the work of someone who had learned how easily conscience can be bent by certainty. He no longer trusted sincerity alone. He trusted examination. He trusted restraint. He trusted the slow, uncomfortable work of naming injustice even when it implicated the powerful---including himself.
In that sense, repentance became a discipline rather than a moment. A way of living that accepted responsibility without expecting relief. A way of staying awake to the cost of one's own authority.
And that, I think, is what was really happening in that church. Not the closing of a chapter---but the beginning of a different kind of moral attention.
What Sewall was confessing that winter morning was not abstract wrongdoing. It was specific. It had names.
He had been a judge in the Salem witch trials.
From the bench, he had participated in proceedings that treated fear as evidence and accusation as proof. Men and women were arrested, examined, condemned. Among them were Giles Corey and his wife, Martha Corey.
Giles Corey refused to enter a plea. Under the law of the time, that refusal carried a consequence meant to force compliance. He was subjected to peine forte et dure---pressed beneath increasing weight of stones until he either entered a plea or he died, after days, his body failed. He died without entering a plea in to court. Because he never entered a plea, his property passed to his sons rather than being his estate passed on to his sons instead of being seized by the Massachusetts colonial government.
This was legal. It was procedural. It was done in daylight, under authority, by men who believed they were defending the moral order of their world.
And Sewall was one of them.
That is the sin he named. Not hysteria in the abstract. Not a tragic misunderstanding. His own participation in a system that killed innocent men and women---while calling itself righteous.
This is what gives his confession its weight. He did not claim ignorance. He did not argue intention. He did not ask history to be gentle with him. He acknowledged that the law had been wrong, that authority had failed, and that he had been part of that failure.
In doing so, something rare entered the historical record: the admission that moral catastrophe can occur without malice, and that sincerity does not absolve responsibility. The harm done at Salem could not be undone. Giles Corey would not return. Martha Corey would not be restored. But Sewall's confession placed a marker that would matter long after the trials themselves faded into memory.
It said: authority is not finished answering when the sentence is carried out. It must answer again---when the truth is known.
That recognition did not redeem the past. But it changed what the future could demand.
I think we already know something important, even if we don't always say it out loud. We know that institutions are made by people. And we know what that means. They can protect, and they can wound. They can carry wisdom forward, and they can also carry harm far longer than any single life.
Understanding this doesn't shock us anymore. What still matters is what we do with that understanding.
Because knowing how injustice happens doesn't make it disappear. Explaining it doesn't dissolve responsibility. When harm is done through a system---through rules, offices, procedures---it doesn't float free of accountability just because no single person meant it. Institutions don't get absolved by being human. They are answerable because they are.
What I've noticed, watching across time, is that institutions have a capacity individuals don't. They endure. They remain. And because they remain, they can turn back toward their own past and answer it. They can name what was done. They can accept responsibility. They can attempt repair---not perfectly, not completely, but sincerely. Even when those who were harmed are no longer here to hear the words.
That matters more than we sometimes realize.
Our ability to see injustice clearly---to look back and say, this should never have happened---is not a betrayal of history. It's evidence of growth. It tells us that something in us has learned. That our moral attention has widened. The past didn't fail because people were uniquely cruel. It failed because certain harms had not yet been fully seen. The fact that we see them now means something real has changed.
And still, some things cannot be undone. Lives lost do not return. Suffering endured cannot be erased. When repair reaches its limits, responsibility doesn't end---it changes. It becomes the work of building a world where what once seemed acceptable no longer finds shelter. Where the structures we inherit are shaped by what we refuse to repeat.
I don't think this is about guilt. And it isn't about condemnation. It's about continuity. About staying in relationship with truth across generations. About letting what we now understand shape what we are willing to become.
If any of this feels familiar, that's because it already lives in the world you inhabit. You expect institutions to answer for harm. You expect acknowledgment. You expect change. That expectation isn't naïve. It's hopeful. And it carries responsibility with it.
I've seen that hope before. It's quieter than certainty. But it lasts longer.
When I sit with stories like this, I don't find myself asking what I would have done in that time. That question is too easy, and too distant. What stays with me is something quieter---and closer.
I wonder how we learn to notice when certainty has begun to harden. When conviction stops listening. When doing the right thing feels effortless, unquestioned, almost automatic. Those are the moments that worry me most, not because they are malicious, but because they are comfortable.
You don't need authority to be part of something that causes harm. Most people never do. All it takes is belonging. Agreement. Silence. Trust in a system that asks less of us than our conscience quietly knows it should.
I think that's why repentance, when it is real, always feels a little lonely. It means stepping out of alignment with what once felt safe. It means letting go of the hope that being sincere will be enough. And it means choosing truth even when it costs us the comfort of being right.
If you feel uneasy sitting with this, that's not a failure of understanding. It's a sign of care. The world doesn't change because people become perfect. It changes because some are willing to pause, to look again, and to say, this isn't what we meant to build.
You don't have to resolve anything tonight. You don't have to know what repair would look like, or where responsibility should land. Just notice where you already expect more---from systems you trust, from stories you inherit, from yourself.
Those expectations matter. They are how the future recognizes itself.
Before we part, I want to leave you with a name.
Sebastian Castellio lived earlier than Sewall, in a time when certainty also carried deadly consequences. Where others argued over doctrine, Castellio asked a simpler, more dangerous question: Who gave you the right? Who gave you the right to punish, to kill, to destroy a life in the name of being correct?
If Sewall's story is about what it means to answer for harm once it has been done, Castellio's is about the courage to refuse it before it begins. He stood against religious violence not with power, but with words---and paid a steep price for that refusal.
Next time, we'll sit with that question together. Not as an accusation, but as an invitation. Because every age needs people willing to ask it, and every age finds new reasons not to.
For now, thank you for staying with me through a difficult story. For not turning away. For trusting that naming harm is not the opposite of hope, but one of its most honest forms.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.