these three worthies pressed forward, and greeted ethan brand each after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he would find something far better worth seeking than the unpardonable sin. no mind, which has wrought itself by intense and solitary meditation into a high state of enthusiasm, can endure the kind of contact with low and vulgar modes of thought and feeling to which ethan brand was now subjected. it made him doubt and, strange to say, it was a painful doubt whether he had indeed found the unpardonable sin, and found it within himself. the whole question on which he had exhausted life, and more than life, looked like a delusion.