Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his afterthought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people's doom upon. The belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative?by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's history and fate!
在那年代，凡是流星出現(xiàn)和不象日月升落這么規(guī)律的其它自然現(xiàn)象，統(tǒng)統(tǒng)都被解釋為超自然力量所給予的啟示，這是再普通不過的事了。于是，在午夜的天空中，如果看到一支閃光的長矛、一支冒著烈焰的劍、一張弓、一簇箭這類形象，便會認為是印第安人要打仗的預(yù)兆。瘟疫，則人所周知是由一陣紅光示警的。從移民時期直到革命年代，凡是發(fā)生在新英格蘭的重大事件，無論好也罷，壞也罷，恐怕都受過這類性質(zhì)的某種景象的事先警告。許多人都曾多次見過。不過，更多的情況是，這種景象的可信性不過是某個單獨的目睹者心誠所致，他用想象中那種有色的、放大的和變形的中介來看待這種奇跡，再在事后的回憶中更加清晰地勾勒出來。國家的命運居然會在無限的天際中用這些可怕而費解的符號揭示出來，這種念頭實在偉大。對于上蒼來說，在這樣廣漠的軸卷上寫下對一個民族的判決，恐怕也不能算太大。我們的先祖篤信這類事情倒是好事，因為這說明，他們的新生的共和國，是在天意的格外垂青和嚴格監(jiān)視之下的。但是，當(dāng)某人發(fā)現(xiàn)出現(xiàn)在同樣大幅的卷面上的一個啟示只是針對他一人的時候，我們又該作何評論呢？在這種情況下——當(dāng)一個人由于長期的和強烈的隱痛而備受自我反省的煎熬，他把自我已經(jīng)擴展到整個大自然，以致天空本身不過是適于書寫他的歷史和命運的紙張時，這種“啟示”只能是他精神狀態(tài)極度混亂的癥狀罷了！

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter- the letter A- marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another's guilt might have seen another symbol in it.
因此，當(dāng)牧師抬眼眺望天頂，看到出現(xiàn)了用暗紅色的光線勾出的巨大字母“A”時，我們只能歸結(jié)為他由于心病而眼睛出了毛病。這并非是說，當(dāng)時根本沒有流星出現(xiàn)并在云靄中隱隱燃燒；而是說并沒有他那負罪的想象力所賦予的那種形狀；或者，至少不是那么確定無疑——別的罪人也可能從中看到另一種象征呢。