Symbols in "The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorn

I bet you are wondering, what is the symbol in this story. Well, let's talk about the symbol. In this short story, Mr. Hooper, was the minister in a wedding, but he was wearing a black veil. Not very good with a wedding, because a wedding is is a happy moment. Not a sad moment. This veil starts a discussion over why he is wearing this veil. When there was a funeral, and he let the dead young girl "see" his face. Afterwords, some people "saw" him walking hand and hand with the dead girl. It was appropriate on that context, but not at a wedding. In my literature class, we thought he was hiding sin because of this funeral moment. We thought he had been cheating on his fiancée with this young girl. The main topic of this story and in the story is the black veil. That is why the symbol is the black veil. At the end it says,
"Father Hooper's breath heaved; it rattled in his throat; but, with a mighty effort, grasping forward with his hands, he caught hold of life, and held it back till he should speak. He even raised himself in bed; and there he sat, shivering with the arms of death around him, while the black veil hung down, awful at that last moment, in the gathered terrors of a lifetime. And yet the faint, sad smile, so often there, now seemed to glimmer from its obscurity, and linger on Father Hooper's lips.

"Why do you tremble at me alone?" cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. "Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!"

While his auditors shrank from one another, in mutual affright, Father Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse, with a faint smile lingering on the lips. Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave. The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial stone is moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it mouldered beneath the Black Veil!"

That is why I think that the symbol is the black veil, and why I think that.