Who says 'I...whom you so reverence and trust, and utterly a pollution and a lie.'?

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The line shows a speaker who has been deeply honored by others yet hides a hidden sin, and he names that dissonance openly. The speaker is Dimmesdale, the Puritan minister who has secretly fathered Hester’s child. He recognizes that the reverence and trust he receives from the community mask his own guilt and deceit, calling himself “a pollution and a lie.” This moment highlights the tension between public virtue and private sin, a central Hawthorne theme in The Scarlet Letter.

Pearl, Hester, and Chillingworth don’t fit this self-revealing posture. Pearl isn’t the one to speak of public reverence or personal hypocrisy; Hester bears the scarlet letter and speaks from a place of bearing shame, not accusing herself to the public as a holy man. Chillingworth’s focus is vengeance and manipulation, not a confession of being a lie to the community.