Two examples of this connection from The Crucible are John Proctor and, to a lesser extent, Reverend Hale. Before the show began, John was having an affair with his servant, Abigail. Because of the high standards he held himself to, the realization that he had not been faithful to his wife left him tormented by a constant sense of guilt and caused him “…to think of himself as something of an impostor” (Miller 79). To make matters worse, his wife, Elizabeth, found out about the affair. In a perfect example of how a guilty conscience can influence a person's thoughts, Elizabeth's knowledge of John's infidelity led John to make every attempt possible to please her in the following months. Unfortunately, her guilty conscience was not assuaged, and was the ultimate cause of her decision, at the end of the play, not to "confess" to being a witch (Miller 260-261). As for Reverend Hale, he was the driving force behind the witch trials at the beginning of the play. As events progressed, however, he began to believe the victims and realized that they were not actually witches. Feeling guilty that innocent citizens were being hanged, he returned to Salem even after the trials were out of his hands to attempt to get the remaining defendants to confess (Miller 241-242). In his faith it was strictly forbidden to lie, so Hale would never have asked anyone to confess falsely if he had not felt extreme guilt throughout the series of